60 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



successive days and nights ; the periodical miracle 

 of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is 

 paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his 

 journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the 

 temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that ' the 

 frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously 

 without the help of fire ' (Sat. v. 97-100). 



Middleton, and those of his school, thought that 

 they were near primary formations when they struck 

 on these suggestive classic or pagan parallels to 

 Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had 

 probed a comparatively recent layer ; since, far 

 beneath, lay the unsuspected prehistoric deposits of 

 barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and com- 

 posed of, man's earliest speculations about himself 

 and his surroundings. When, however, we borrow 

 an illustration from geology, it must be remembered 

 that our divisions, like those into which the strata of 

 the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no 

 real detachment. . The difference between former 

 and present methods of research is that nowadays 

 we have gone further down for discovery of the 

 common materials of which barbaric, pagan, and 

 civilised ideas are compounded. They arise in the 

 comparison which exists in the savage mind between 

 the living and the non-living, and in the attribution 

 of like qualities to things superficially resembling one 

 another ; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes 

 active form in what may be generally termed magic. 

 For example, the rite of baptism is explained when 

 we connect it with barbaric lustrations and water- 

 worship generally ; as also that of the Eucharist by 

 reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods ; 



