ANIMISTIC PLANTING MAN IN 

 CONNECTION WITH THE CATEGORIES 



AFTER many years of gradual development man 

 started to plant, and he did so at the season of the 

 year which his ancestors had handed down to him as 

 the marriage season. Man had now entered well 

 into the animistic stage of his existence ; and the 

 hunter had developed not only into a farmer, but also 

 into a medicine-man. Man also, though perhaps still 

 more or less of a wanderer, had settled down during 

 the rainy season and lived with his wives and family. 

 He watched the seasons, and noted that after having 

 copulated and planted his wife conceived and plants 

 germinated ; his wife became pregnant, and the earth 

 yielded its fulness or harvest ; and, finally, as the 

 fruits of trees rotted, so his wife either died with the 

 dying rainy season or then lived through the 

 dangerous 7th and 8th months, and finally gave birth 

 to her offspring just at the time of rest and before he 

 had to go trapping fish and hunting animals again. 

 This all seems to me a perfectly natural development 

 of that sympathetic magic of which we hear so much 

 as existing between procreation and production and 

 the seasons. 



