nature's appeal. 
43 
that the Nilotic tribes of the Ja-luo call their god by the name 
of Chieng, which is the word used by them for the sun, and they 
do homage to the sun by spitting- towards the East every morning 
and towards the West every evening. The Masai worship certain 
kinds of trees, and regard grass as a sacred symbol (832). 
Amongst the Bantu negroes rivers are considered to be the homes 
of spirits, and they recognise rain-spirits ; they also employ tree- 
worship. The Bahinia, a tribe of the Bantu, have a name for 
God, " though, when questioned, they can only associate the over- 
ruling power with the sky, the rain, and the thunder-storm " (631). 
It is obvious, therefore, that these people look upon the forces of 
Nature — storms, earthquakes, lightning, &c, and many of the 
objects around them, such as trees, rivers, &c, as the work of 
spirits or the home of spirits. Their pantheism is of a crude type ; 
but we can have little idea of their actual feelings owing to the 
poorness of their language and of their means of expressing what 
they feel. Poets and philosophers have occasionally attempted to 
be the spokesmen of the savage's views on religion. Browning's 
"Caliban upon Setebos " will occur to you. You no doubt re- 
member how he looks upon the raven as a messenger who informs 
the god of poor Caliban's talk and sends his thunder and lightning 
to follow up the criminal. Such views are by no means confined 
to savage nations ; but as knowledge increases the form of the 
religion becomes more exalted ; but the terrible forces of Nature 
are still either spirits or are the direct weapons of the deity. The 
Rev. Smythe Palmer ("Nineteenth Century," October, 1909) says 
that the Jews believed that the God of the Firmament rode forth 
on the four winds of heaven, personified by Cherubim ; and the 
Seraphim, according to the same authority, are the lightning 
flashes wriggling like fiery serpents before the throne of the 
Eternal. Many passages in the Old Testament suggesting this will 
occur to you (Psalm civ., 3-4, " He maketh the clouds his chariots," 
&c.) as in Milton's " Paradise Lost." There is reason to think 
that our Saxon ancestors associated hills and rivers with certain 
spirits. Now all this has a very important bearing upon our 
subject. If we inherit the physical frames of our ancestors, and 
even inherit for a time, especially in our pre-natal development 
(which I shall refer to directly), certain peculiarities of those remote 
ancestors from whom we have widely diverged — if this is true, 
can we escape the corollary that we must inherit also their instincts, 
and even, perhaps, the general trend of their religious beliefs? 
And one of the strongest and most universal beliefs of primitive 
man, and one that has come down, modified, but the same in 
principle, to many modern nations, is the spiritual essence of the 
various phenomena produced by the great forces of Nature. So 
that when we feel those powerful and inexplicable feelings which 
draw us so strongly to Nature, are we not really listening to 
those old instincts and beliefs which have been for thousands of 
generations impressed upon every fibre of our being? 
You may be sure that many a man, besides the poet, has 
heard in solitude the "horns of elf-land faintly blowing," and the 
