THE PRIMITIVE IDEA OP GOD. 261 



The Lapps, Greenlanders, and Hottentots, are said to 

 refuse to eat hares, and so do the Samal Arabs, while 

 even the Chinese are said to object to it.* The 

 ancient Britons had the same superstition, and their 

 conquerors, the Saxons, held the hare as sacred to the 

 goddess Freya. The bones of the hare are not found 

 in the Danish shell-heaps or the Swiss lake-habita- 

 tions, whence it is inferred that the ancient peoples 

 who have left these remains did not eat the hare. 

 They do, however, occur in the debris in the cave of 

 Mentone and in the Belgian caves ; showing that the 

 hare was not everywhere regarded with the same 

 veneration among the earliest races of Europe, or per- 

 haps that, as in America, where the Hare Indians and 

 many other tribes feed much on this animal, while 

 still regarding it with a certain traditional veneration, 

 the regard for it as a religious emblem did not hinder 

 its use as food. A recent writer, who mentions many 

 of these facts, seems to think that they have some con- 

 nection with the rejection of the hare as food by the 

 Jews, which he wrongly states was owing to <e a false 

 impression about its chewing its cud," whereas this 

 would have been a reason for regarding it as clean, the 

 reason of rejecting it being that it had paws instead 

 of hoofs. But the Jewish Scriptures have no trace of 

 the superstitious regard for the animal, and the Algon- 

 quin and Iroquois traditions give us the most probable 

 explanation of the religious veneration of the hare in 

 regarding it as the emblem of the Divine Spirit. 

 * Lubbock, " Pre-historic Times." 



