656 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nary or nonexistent beings of a most shadowy description, and 

 who treat these queer creatures of their own fancy with such 

 respect and tenderness that they actually offer to them food and 

 drink, and all the other things the savage holds most dear, out of 

 pure apparent superabundance of philanthropy. Why on earth 

 should they take the trouble to begin making presents of food and 

 drink to mere wood-spirits or oreads with whom they had no 

 earthly connection or interest of any sort ? Here, as elsewhere, 

 c'est le premier pas qui coute. The offerings made to tree-spirits 

 are precisely the same in kind as the offerings made to dead rela- 

 tions. Dead relations are buried under trees ; the nearer we get 

 to primitive customs, the more do we see that the tree-spirit is the 

 ghost, and the more does everybody who has anything to do with 

 him recognize and admit the patent fact. It is only when we have 

 moved very far away from primitive usage and primitive modes 

 of thought, that we begin to find tree-gods whose ghostliness is 

 uncertain, and tales about their origin in which their former hu- 

 manity is ignored or forgotten. The lowest savages never seem to 

 harbor the faintest doubt that the gods whom they worship in tree 

 or stone or temple are nothing more or less than their own ghostly 

 ancestors. 



Again, all the prerogatives which Mr. Frazer assigns to sacred 

 trees * are also prerogatives of the deified ancestor. Thus, trees 

 or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and sunshine. But we saw 

 this was precisely the function of the ancestral ghosts among Mr. 

 Duff Macdonald's Blantyre negroes, as indeed it is in endless other 

 cases which I need hardly recall to the anthropological reader, f 

 Once more, tree-spirits make the crops grow. Of this belief Mr. 

 Frazer gives many interesting examples. Among the Mundaris, 

 "the grove deities are held responsible for the crops, and are 

 especially honored at all the great agricultural festivals." Swedish 

 peasants stick a leafy branch in each furrow of their cornfields, 

 believing that this will insure an abundant crop. Among the 

 tribes of Gilgit in India, the sacred tree is a species of cedar — as 

 usual an evergreen — and at the beginning of sowing, the people 

 mix their seed-corn with sprigs of this holy conifer, and smoke it 

 all above a bonfire of the sacred cedar wood. But all this goes on 

 all fours with the common belief, on which I need not further 

 enlarge, that it is the deified ancestors who make the earth bring 

 forth her increase, and that all crops are the immediate gift of the 

 " compassionate father," to whom the savage prays for the simple 

 boons which make up all his happiness. Furthermore, the tree- 

 spirit causes the herds to multiply, and blesses women with many 



* The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 66 



f See Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i, part i, passim. 



