334 Canadian Record of Science. 
A wide spread superstition among the Algonquins, due 
to such superstitious ideas as the above, is that the tales 
must not be told in summer, since “at that season, when 
all nature is full of life, the spirits are awake, and hearing 
what is said of them, may take offence, whereas in winter 
they are fast sealed up in snow and ice, and no longer 
capable of listening.” ! 
As a natural consequence of this animistic theory, which 
endowed trees with souls, or of the once wide-spread 
custom of ancestor worship, in the agricultural stage of all 
primitive peoples, plant worship was an important feature 
of religion. Grant Allan says, at the dawn of history, men 
poured libations and scattered fruits upon the graves of 
their dead. As a result the barrows displayed a most 
luxuriant vegetation. Knowing nothing of the cause of 
fertility primitive man attributed it to the spirits of the 
dead, and transferred the worship of the ancestor to tree or 
flower. Formerly, according to Charlevoix, “ the Indians 
in the neighborhood of Acadia had in their country, near 
the sea shore, a tree extremely ancient, of which they 
relate many wonders, and which was always laden with 
offerings. After the sea had laid open its whole root, it 
supported itself a long time, almost in the air, against the 
violence of the wind and the waves, which confirmed those 
Indians in the notion that the tree must be the abode of 
some powerful spirit. Nor was its fall, even, capable of 
undeceiving them, so that as long as the smallest part of its 
branches appeared above the water, they paid it the same 
honour as whilst it stood.” 
There has ever been in men’s minds the idea of the 
antagonism of good and evil. So plants were supposed to 
be the abodes, not of beneficent beings only, but of demons. 
Sometimes, poisonous or repulsive plants were thus devoted, 
but no rule seems to have decided the matter. Many of 
our common names at the present day associate certain 
plants with his Satanic Majesty. In the Hastern Townships, 
1 The Jesuits in North America. 
