46 THE OEIGIN OF ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 



intelligible origin of tlie feticliistic conception ; and we 

 are enabled to see how it tends to become a general, if 

 not a universal, conception. 



Other apparently inexplicable phenomena are at the 

 same time divested of their strangeness. I refer to the 

 beliefs in, and worship of, compound monsters impossible 

 hybrid animals, and forms that are half human, half brutal. 

 The theory of a primordial Fetichism, supposing it other 

 wise adequate, yields no feasible solution of these. Grant 

 the alleged original tendency to think of all natural agen 

 cies as in some way personal. Grant, too, that hence may 

 arise a worship of animals, plants, and even inanimate 

 bodies. Still the obvious implication is that the worship 

 so derived will be limited to things that are, or have been, 

 perceived. Why should this mode of thought lead the 

 savage to imagine a combination of bird and mammal ; 

 and not only to imagine it, but worship it as a god ? If 

 even we admit that some illusion may have suggested the 

 belief iii a creature half man, half fish, we cannot thus 

 explain the prevalence among Eastern races of idols repre 

 senting bird-headed men, men having their legs replaced 

 by the legs of a cock, and men with the heads of elephants. 



Carrying with us the inferences above drawn, how 

 ever, it is a manifest corollary that ideas and practices of 

 these kinds will arise. When tradition preserves both 

 lines of ancestry when a chief, nicknamed the Wolf, car 

 ries away from an adjacent tribe a wife who is remem 

 bered either under the animal name of her tribe, or as a 

 woman ; it will happen that if a son distinguishes him 

 self, the remembrance of him among his descendants will 

 be that he was born of a wolf and some other animal, or 

 of a wolf and a woman. Misinterpretation, arising in the 

 way described from defects of language, will entail belief 



