the patient carries to the wood some bread and salt in a clean rag, and leaving it with a prayer, comes home cured.[1] Names like Holyoake and Holywood record our own old memories of the holy trees and groves, memories long lingering in the tenacious peasant mind; and it was a great and sacred linden-tree with three stems, standing in the parish of Hvitaryd in South Sweden, which with curious fitness gave a name to the family of Linnæus. Lastly, Jakob Grimm even ventures to connect historically the ancient sacred inviolate wood with the later royal forest, an ethnological argument which would begin with the savage adoring the Spirit of the Forest, and end with the modern landowner preserving his pheasants.[2]
To the modern educated world, few phenomena of the lower civilization seem more pitiable than the spectacle of a man worshipping a beast. We have learnt the lessons of Natural History at last thoroughly enough to recognize our superiority to our 'younger brothers,' as the Red Indians call them, the creatures whom it is our place not to adore but to understand and use. By men at lower levels of culture, however, the inferior animals are viewed with a very different eye. For various motives, they have become objects of veneration ranking among the most important in the lower ranges of religion. Yet I must here speak shortly and slightly of Animal-worship, not as wanting in interest, but as over-abounding in difficulty. Wishing rather to bring general principles into view than to mass uninterpreted facts, all I can satisfactorily do is to give some select examples from the various groups of evidence, so as at once to display the more striking features of the subject, and to trace the ancient ideas upward from the savage level far into the higher civilization.
First and foremost, uncultured man seems capable of simply worshipping a beast as beast, looking on it as possessed of power, courage, cunning, beyond his own, and
