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. heard in the Amazonian forests, and similar accounts come from 
Ceylon. Everything not immediately obvious becomes obvious 
enough if we admit invisible agency ; and the savage finds that 
the wind, which is invisible, is an extremely powerful being, 
which makes it easy enough for him to fancy that there are other 
invisible beings which cause the results not obvious to him. These 
invisible beings he creates to himself in his own image, after his 
own likeness, as was noted by the Greek philosopher Xenophanes 
long before the time of Plato. The element of chance has not 
been sufficiently noticed in the study of the origin of beliefs and 
customs. That ill-success in an undertaking, as for instance in 
finding game, should have been considered due to the malevolence 
of a personal being, must have been a very early notion. Another 
point to which much attention has of late been directed, is the 
worship of stones. Whenever a savage race finds a large 
stone left by glacial action in a peculiar position, it bows 
down before the unknown forces that placed the stone thus, 
and everywhere we find large stones held in _ peculiar 
reverence. 
Perhaps the most wonderful invention of man is that of fire. 
_ Man has been defined as a cooking animal ; and the cooking of 
meat makes it so much more digestible that this one point has 
given man an enormous advantage over the beasts, by liberating 
a very large part of his energy from the mere process of sustain- 
ing life. Now savages all over the world have discovered how 
_ to produce fire in a few minutes by rubbing a sharpened stick in 
a hollow stick. Folk-lore is not silent as to its discovery, and 
everywhere we find that some national hero is supposed to have 
brought fire from heaven concealed in a stick. Savages who 
saw fire produced in the storm-cloud above, sometimes communi- 
cated to the earth, naturally thought it must have been brought 
thence; and the Greek name Prometheus is singularly repro- 
duced in pramantha, the Sanscrit word for the fire-making 
instrument. This is an excellent example of the right use of 
the philological method. 
The notion of magical power which speedily associates 
itself with the fetish often lingers through association down into 
more advanced periods of national culture. This was very 
strikingly the case in ancient Greece. Pausanias, as late as 
the second century of our era, found, as he made his tour through 
_ Greece, that the works of its great artists were duly valued, but 
that the rude inartistic stone images of much earlier times were 
more reverenced. The tales, often grotesque, sometimes revolting, 
