52 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANATOMICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



those trees, those rocks, those aspects of nature from which he suffers or 

 which he uses to his advantage ; he notices shapes of the hills and rocks 

 only so far as they resemble a human form or some familiar animal, or have 

 some " striking " features such as a sharp peak or jagged ridge. Those pheno- 

 mena, as the word " striking " suggests, come unsought to the mind, they 

 leap into the experience, precisely as if they had some life and influence of 

 their own ; so the primitive man regards the rock of curious shape, or the 

 river with its compelling sound, or the tree which drops its fruit at his feet, 

 as a living and acting thing. 



Any great and important discovery or invention or change of habit 

 leaves its mark in the beliefs as well as in the customs of the people; 

 consider, for example, the part which is played both in our fiction and in 

 our science by the motor-car and the aeroplane. On primitive man the 

 discovery of the way of making fire and light must have made an immense 

 impression; so we have the wide-spread customs of the sacred fire; at the 

 Beltane fire the original method of making fire by rubbing one piece of 

 wood on another is still the sacramental practice in some places. In other 

 cases, as the Vestal Virgin group of customs, the fire on the sacred hearth 

 must not be allowed to die out. The domestication of cattle and of the 

 horse have left their mark in the worship of the sacred bull or the sacred 

 cow, and in the myth of the water-kelpie and other similar supernatural 

 beings. Wells also had a vital importance in primitive life ; hence the 

 superstitions universally connected with them. Iron must have given an 

 immediate advantage to its possessors over the men provided only with 

 stone weapons, and must have correspondingly impressed the latter, and so 

 we find iron as a protective charm over all the world. Salt, the personal 

 name, writing, may be other instances. 



A second law is that of association by contiguity ; when two things 

 have been experienced in close succession, the one tends to call up the other 

 afterwards in the mind, so that having seen the one we tend to expect the 

 other, and again when we merely think of the one in the mind, we also tend 

 to think of the other. In primitive man, as still in the child, this succession 

 of ideas, this tendency of one idea to call up another, is not referred to the 

 mind as such but is referred to the things themselves, so that the rock, for 

 example, which has attracted the attention, is regarded as the cause of the 

 successful hunting that immediately followed; the thought of the rock tends 



