SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 51 



of crop.* Many of our children's games still perpetuate this old dreadful 

 lottery. Midsummer Eve is still the time when the fairies are most powerful, 

 when babes and young folk are most likely to be taken. 



3. The supernatural lapse of time in fairyland, so far as it speaks of 

 centuries, or even of years, must, as S. Hartland points out, be of compar- 

 atively late development, as primitive man could probably not count beyond 

 ten ; but the supposed extraordinary rapid flow of time may be explained 

 perhaps by two classes of phenomena the quickness with which time passes, 

 during sleep or a trance, an ecstasy, intoxication, or an interesting activity 

 such as dancing and hunting ; and the repeated sacrifices from year to year 

 of a being representing the god of corn, or the spirit of the corn," regarded as 

 always youthful, and as being reborn each year, must have suggested the 

 idea of a single individual living without change, over whose head therefore 

 time passes without the marked effects that others experience. In the stories, 

 for example, the man who comes back to the world after one or twenty or 

 two hundred years is not changed in appearance from what he was when he 

 entered fairyland, although the world about him has changed so enormously ; 

 in some of the more gruesome tales he crumbles to dust as soon as he has 

 touched the earth, or committed some other tabooed action against which his 

 deliverer had warned him.f 



4. The conditions under which the fairies are visible, and the power 

 they have of appearing to some persons and not to others, &c., may also be 

 traced back to the customs of initiation on the one side, and of sacrifice on 

 the other. 



The whole class of beliefs in nature-spirits, in household gods, local and 

 tribal gods, and the rest, has been variously traced to ideas of a double 

 existence between body and soul, derived in their turn from experience of 

 dreams, of visions of the dead, of shadows, reflections in water, and the like. 

 But we must look behind these to the simple and mental processes which 

 we all use constantly in the practical affairs of life First, the principle of 

 selection, or apperception, by which we see and hear only what interests us, 

 only what has some practical importance for us; the result is that man 

 views nature, at this early stage, as a duplicate of himself, he notices only 



*Frazer, op. eit., Vol. III. (1900), p. 259. 

 fv. Hartland, rip. til., chap. 9. 



