in their stalls and while they strayed in the forest.[1] Lastly, in the sacred spring which bubbled, and the perpetual fire which seems to have burned in the Arician grove,[2] we may perhaps detect traces of other attributes of forest gods, the power, namely, to make the rain to fall and the sun to shine.[3] This last attribute perhaps explains why Virbius, the companion deity of Diana at Nemi, was by some believed to be the sun.[4]
Thus the cult of the Arician grove was essentially that of a tree-spirit or wood deity. But our examination of European folk-custom demonstrated that a tree-spirit is frequently represented by a living person, who is regarded as an embodiment of the tree-spirit and possessed of its fertilising powers; and our previous survey of primitive belief proved that this conception of a god incarnate in a living man is common among rude races. Further we have seen that the living person who is believed to embody in himself the tree-spirit is often called a king, in which respect, again, he strictly represents the tree-spirit. For the sacred cedar of the Gilgit tribes is called, as we have seen, “the Dreadful King”;[5] and the chief forest god of the Finns, by name Tapio, represented as an old man with a brown beard, a high hat of fir-cones and a coat of tree-moss, was styled the Wood King, Lord of the Woodland, Golden King of the Wood.[6] May not then the King of the Wood in the Arician grove have been, like the King of May, the Grass King, and the like, an incarnation of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation? His title, his sacred
