A great cloud of witnesses' could be summoned in confirmation of this view, and the testimony to the persistence of the conviction is the stronger when the evidence is cited not from the lowest, but from relatively advanced, races. Take, as example, the Blackfeet Indians of to-day, a tribe who are more firmly rooted than ever in their sun-worship, because, they say, the 'Black-robed (Catholics) teach us one thing, and the 'Men-with-whiteneckties' (Protestants)' teach us another, so we are confused. To them

'the Great Spirit... is everywhere and in everything-mountains, plains, winds, water, trees, birds and animals. Whether animals have mind and the reasoning faculty admits of no doubt with the Blackfeet, for they believe that all animals receive their endowment of power from the sun, differing in degree, but the same in kind as that received by man and by all things animate and inanimate. Some birds and animals, like the grizzly bear, buffalo, beaver, wolf, eagle and raven * (in whose wisdom and actions, as a key to the future, belief is strong), are worshipped, because they possess a larger amount of the Good Power than others.' †

To the Indians of Guiana, Sir Everard im Thurn says, 'all objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident of bodily form, and have spirits which differ not at all in kind from those of men.'‡ All this sounds strange to us modern dwellers in towns, familiar with animals only as domesticated, and frequently as pampered dependentswith animals, therefore, whose faculties are blunted. We can form no conception of their wild congeners, nimble, alert, forced to fend for themselves as 'gamins' of the jungle; hence the gulf that separates the wild and the tame fauna of the world.

The guesses of the savage have become in these latter days the certainties of the scientist. For the long delay in reaching these, the doctrine that man is a being apart from all other living things is mainly responsible; and thence much evil, due to lack of knowledge and therefore of sympathy, has followed. The Italian of to-day who,

The Moors believe that he who kills a raven easily goes mad.' Westermarck's 'Origin of Moral Ideas,' ii, p. 491.

+ McClintock's Old North Trail,' p. 167.

Among the Indians of Guiana,' p. 350.

when accused of wanton cruelty to his horse, pleads in justification, 'Non è cosa battezzata' (it is not a baptised thing'), adopts an attitude towards animals which resulted from the ecclesiastical teaching of a thousand years. But, in spite of this doctrine, the primitive belief in the oneness of man with nature continued to persist throughout the Middle Ages and even to our own day, in the judicial view that animals possess a moral nature, and should therefore be punished for their misdeeds. From the ninth to the nineteenth century the archives of secular and sacred tribunals preserve records of the trial and the capital punishment or, in lighter cases, excommunication of animals as criminally responsible for human deaths and disasters. Justification for such a code might be found in the Hebrew law which decreed, 'If an ox gore a man or woman till they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned, but his flesh shall not be eaten.' But that law embodied barbaric Semitic conceptions whose persistence is proved by the placing of animals on the same footing as human malefactors. Thus only can be explained such actions as that of the Council of Worms in 864, in decreeing the suffocation of a hive of bees which had stung a man to death; or the citation, in 1478, of crop-destroying vermin to appear before the Bishop of Lausanne to be 'duly cursed and exorcised'; or the commendation of a pious parson, Daniel Greysser, by Augustus Duke and Elector, in 1559, for putting church-going sparrows under ban by reason of their 'scandalous unchastity during the sermon'; or the not infrequent records of the burning or hanging of homicidal pigs, cows and goats.

Corresponding ideas probably explain the punishment of inanimate objects which were occasion of death per infortunium. The chattel which caused the fatality was forfeited as a 'deodand' to the Crown for pious uses; and, in England, the law so named was not abolished until 1846. Blackstone refers its origin to 'the blind days of popery as an expiation for the souls snatched away by sudden death'; but Sir Fitzjames Stephen is nearer the truth in suggesting that the law was 'passed under a

* Exodus xxi, 28. The native code of Malacca is identical with this.' See Westermarck's 'Origin of Moral Ideas,' i, 253.

sort of impression that the things which caused death ought to be punished.'

Name-giving would indubitably strengthen the belief in kinship; the groups who were called by the names of certain animals, more rarely of objects, would come to regard these as their ancestors. For, to the savage, his name is no mere label of convenience, but an integral part of himself. The conviction gives rise to all sorts of dodges to avert the evil which, through knowledge of his name, the witch-doctor will work upon him; and in this confusion of real and nominal lie the roots of such superstitions as name-avoidance, and the use of words as instruments of black and white magic, from the mantrams 'that enchain the power of the gods themselves '† to the cure-charms of the modern peasant. No more strange and fascinating study of the vagaries of the human mind is supplied than that furnished by this phenomenon of the written and the spoken name; and in the early stages of society it played no small part in the identification of the human with the non-human.

But every theory is conjectural; and the most that can be said is that in the above-mentioned factors there may lie traces of the origin of the totem belief and its resulting creations; on the other hand, there may be factors, hidden in unexplored areas, which will upset all our theories. The prudent course is to carry the varied and confused mass in hand to a 'suspense account,' where, for aught that can be said, it will remain. There is danger in 'rushing to a discussion of origins before we have learnt to understand or come to any sort of agreement upon the phenomena themselves'; and the most recent critic of the anthropological method, from whom these words are quoted, utters a necessary warning when he says, 'Because it is practically impossible for us to read the savage mind, we slur over-when we give ourselves to these anthropological studies we slur over-the crux of the difficulty, and think that by piling statistic on statistic we get a body of "facts" which will arrange themselves in reasonable concatenation, in some crystallizing way.' ‡

* History of the Criminal Law of England,' iii, 77.

+ 'Hindu Manners,' etc., by the Abbé J. A. Dubois, i, 140,

C. F. Keary, 'The Pursuit of Reason,' p. 232,

6

Since this article was written, Dr Frazer has issued a further instalment of the third edition of 'The Golden Bough,' under the title of 'The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings.' The necessity for issuing this edition in sectional form is evident from the fact that the two parts now published contain more pages than the original work, which appeared in 1890. The central idea of my essay,' Dr Frazer tells us in the preface to the first edition, is 'the conception of the slain god.' Of the six parts into which the present edition will be divided, the first part, under the title Adonis, Attis and Osiris,' dealt with the origin of magical rites, whose purpose was to secure the rebirth and resurrection of gods identified with vegetation, so that the supply of seed to the sower and bread to the eater' might not fail. In the present sections, Dr Frazer returns to his starting-point of 'preliminary enquiry into the principles of magic and the evolution of the sacred kings in general.' In the second edition of 'The Golden Bough' he says, 'I have come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion. More than that, I believe that, in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion.' This belief, reaffirmed in the present edition, may be proved to be valid; but much of the evidence points to a commingling of ideas corresponding (to borrow a term from geology) to metamorphic strata, in which the interfused condition makes identification of the earlier materials difficult. But the subject can have only bare reference in what is only an enlarged footnote; and, whatever dissent there may be from Dr Frazer's conclusions, there can be only hearty recognition of the debt under which he has placed the student of primitive superstitions.

EDWARD CLODD.

Art. 6.-AN ELIZABETHAN GENTLEWOMAN.

The Journal of Lady Mildmay, circa 1570-1617 (unpublished).

MUCH has been learned of the manners and customs of the last two centuries by the publication of letters, journals and memoirs; but our knowledge of the ordinary life of our ancestors, previous to the Hanoverian period, is gained chiefly from those books which deal with social and domestic life generally. There remain but few personal records of an earlier time to give us those side-lights which illuminate the dry pages of history, and, by revealing the human element in every age, help us to a more sympathetic understanding of the motives and actions of those who lived in bygone times. The journal of a gentle lady of the sixteenth century, written in her old age and giving a complete picture of her life as child and wife, may therefore be of interest; and from it may be gathered how great is the contrast between the ordinary country life of Englishwomen to-day, interspersed with visits to town and abroad, and that of a lady of high position three hundred years ago. The story is preserved in a thick black volume filled with writing, so neat that it seems to spell refinement, even before one reads the pages which so vividly depict the life of Grace Sherrington, first as a child in her father's house, and afterwards as the bride and wife of Sir Anthony Mildmay.

Grace was born about the year 1552 and was the second of the three daughters and co-heiresses of Sir Henry Sherrington, of Laycock Abbey in Wiltshire. Her childhood was spent at Laycock, where she and her sisters were brought up by careful parents and a much-loved governess; the latter, Mrs Hamblyn, being a poor relation who lived with the Sherringtons and helped them in return for the home they gave her, as was frequently the custom at that time. Good and kind as we may believe Grace's parents to have been, her upbringing was stern and hard, according to the rude fashion of the day, which did not spare the rod. To inculcate virtuous precepts, her mother used to beat her severely, and 'never so much as for lying,' the first lesson