30 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as 

 he would shudder at the accusation of any taint of 

 paganism, the ruling of the Fates is more immedi- 

 ately real to him than divine omnipotence. Mr. 

 Tozer confirms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He 

 says: " It is rather the minor deities and those as- 

 sociated with man's ordinary life that have escaped 

 the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim 

 twilight of popular belief." In India, Sir Alfred 

 Lyall tells us that, " even the supreme triad of Hindu 

 allegory, which represents the almighty powers of 

 creation, preservation, and destruction, have long 

 ceased to preside actively over any such correspond- 

 ing distribution of functions." Like limited mon- 

 archs, they reign, but do not govern. They are 

 superseded by the ever-increasing crowd of godlings 

 whose influence is personal and special, as shown by 

 Mr. Crooke in his instructive Introduction to the 

 Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India. 

 The old Roman catalogue of spiritual beings, 

 abstractions as they were, who guarded life in minute 

 detail, is a long one. From the indi git amenta, as 

 such lists are called, we learn that no less than forty- 

 three were concerned with the actions of a child. 

 When the farmer asked Mother Earth for a good 

 harvest, the prayer would not avail unless he also 

 invoked " the spirit of breaking up the land and the 

 spirit of ploughing it crosswise; the spirit of furrow- 

 ing and the spirit of ploughing in the seed; and the 

 spirit of harrowing; the spirit of weeding and the 



