HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 167 



the new-born child is greeted with the words : " Thou 

 hast returned at last ! " The same ideas prevail among 

 the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes 

 of the West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines 

 of Australia the belief is widely diffused that those 

 who die as black return as white men. 



Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise 

 distinction between man and brutes, so that, as Tylor 

 observes, they readily accept the belief of the trans- 

 migration of the human soul into an animal, and then 

 into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in 

 the incarnation of the true fetish. Among some of 

 the North American tribes the spirits of the dead are 

 supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow re- 

 fused to eat seal's flesh because she supposed that her 

 husband's soul had migrated into that animal. 

 Others have imagined that the souls of the dead 

 passed into birds, beetles, and other insects, according 

 to their social rank when still alive. Some African 

 tribes believe that the dead migrate into certain 

 species of apes. 



By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently 

 show more fully, the transition was easy to the incar- 

 nation of a spirit, whether that of a man or of some 

 other being, into any object whatever, which was 

 thereby invested with beneficent or malignant power. 

 It is easy to show that in this second stage of fetishism, 

 which some have believed to be the primitive form of 

 myth, there would be no further progress in the 



