658 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



says Piedrahita, " worshiped every stone as a god, as they said 

 that they had all been men." Arriaga tells us the ancient Peru- 

 vians paid honor to " very large stones, saying that they were once 

 men." In the American Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 

 1880, several stories are told as to the metamorphosis of men into 

 stones from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the 

 Oneidas and Dakotas claim descent from stones, to which they 

 ascribe both sense and animation. What is all this but early 

 men's way of expressing the fact that these stones which they 

 worship represent the ghosts of their deceased ancestors ? Some- 

 times, indeed, we get an interesting connecting link, as in Arriaga' s 

 pregnant statement that the Marcayoc or idol worshiped in Peru 

 as the patron of the village " is sometimes a stone and sometimes 

 a mummy"; in other words, it depended -upon circumstances 

 whether the people reverenced the body itself or the gravestone 

 that covered it." * 



And if men become stones, so too do stones give birth to men. 

 We get a classical instance of this in the legend of Deucalion. 

 Beside the road, near the city of the Panopseans, lay the stones 

 out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man in the 

 Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. On Francis Island, says Mr. 

 Turner, " close by the temple there was a seven-feet-long beach 

 sandstone slab erected, before which offerings were laid as the 

 people united for prayer " ; and the natives here told him that one 

 of their gods had made stones become men. " In Melanesia," says 

 Mr. Andrew Lang, " matters are so mixed that it is not easy to 

 decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man's 

 soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the 

 spirit's outward part or organ." And, indeed, a sort of general 

 confusion between the stone, the tree, the ghost, and the ancestor 

 at last seems to pervade the mind of the savage everywhere. 

 " The curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and 

 wives," as Mr. Tylor calls it — an idea familiar to the Fijians as to 

 the Peruvians and Lapps — is surely explicable at once by the 

 existence of headstones to men and women, and the confusion 

 between the mark and the ghost it commemorates. 



I have introduced this question of the sacred stone at so great 

 length, mainly because of the close analogy which subsists between 

 it and the similar question of the sacred tree. For, just in like 

 fashion, Mr. Galton tells us how on one of his South African 

 wanderings he passed " a magnificent tree. It was the parent of 

 all the Damaras. . . . The savages danced round and round it in 

 great delight." f But I also wish to point out how the general 



* Arriaga, Extirpation de la Idolatria, p. 89. 



f Galton, Narrative of an Explorer, pp. 188, 204. 



