28 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



sonal 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 indigitamenta, 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 

 spirit of reaping ; the spirit of carrying corn to the 

 barn ; and the spirit of bringing it out again.' The 

 country, moreover, swarmed with Chaldaean astro- 

 logers and casters of nativities ; with Etruscan 

 haruspices full of * childish lightning-lore,' who fore- 

 told events from the entrails of sacrificed animals ; 

 while in competition with these there was the State- 

 supported college of augurs to divine the will of the 

 gods by the cries, and direction of the flight, of birds. 

 Well might the satirist of such a time say that the 

 * place was so densely populated with gods as to 

 leave hardly room for the men/ 



It will be seen that the justification for including 

 Lucretius among the Pioneers of Evolution lies in 

 his two signal and momentous contributions to the 

 science of man ; namely, the primitive savagery of 

 the human race ; and the origin of the belief in a 

 soul and a future life. Concerning the first, anthropo- 

 logical research, in its vast accumulation of materials 



