42 THE ORIGIN OF ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 



children who saw him will not be led into error ; but in 

 later generations, descent from the Wolf will inevitably 

 come to mean descent from the animal known by that 

 name. And the ideas and sentiments which, as above 

 shown, naturally grow up around the belief that the dead 

 parents and grandparents are still alive, and ready, if pro 

 pitiated, to befriend their descendants, will be extended 

 to the wolf species. 



Before passing to other developments of this general 

 view, let me point out how not simply animal-worship is 

 thus accounted for, but also the conception, so variously 

 illustrated in ancient legends, that animals are capable 

 of displaying human powers of speech and thought and 

 action. Mythologies are full of stories of beasts and birds 

 and fishes that have played intelligent parts in human 

 aifairs creatures that have befriended particular persons 

 by giving them information, by guiding them, by yielding 

 them help ; or else that have deceived them, verbally or 

 otherwise. Evidently all these traditions, as well as those 

 about abductions of women by animals and fostering of 

 children by them, fall naturally into their places as re 

 sults of the habitual misinterpretation I have described. 



The probability of the hypothesis will appear still 

 greater when we observe how readily it applies to the 

 worship of other orders of objects. Belief in actual de 

 scent from an animal, strange as we may think it, is one 

 by no means incongruous with the unanalyzed experiences 

 of the savage ; for there come under his notice many 

 metamorphoses, vegetal and animal, which are apparently 

 of like character. But how could he possibly arrive at so 

 grotesque a conception as that the progenitor of his tribe 

 was the sun, or the moon, or a particular star? No ob 

 servation of surrounding phenomena affords the slightest 



