and still kindly taking the food given by their grandchildren. In such simple forms there appears among the lower races the notion of transmigration which in Brahmanism and Buddhism becomes a great religious doctrine.

To return to the souls of the dead which flit to and fro as ghosts. These, wherever they dwell, are naturally believed to keep up their interest in the living, and their families hold kindly intercourse with them. Thus, in North America a Mandan woman will talk by the hour to her dead husband or child; and a Chinese is bound to announce any family event, such as a wedding, to the spirits of his ancestors, present in their memorial tablets. The ghosts of dead kinsfolk are not only talked to but fed; the family offer them morsels of food at their own meals, and hold once a year a feast of the dead, when the souls of ancestors for generations back are fancied present and invisibly partaking of the food. Such offerings to the dead not only go on through the savage and barbaric world, but last on into higher civilization, their traces still remaining in Europe. The Russian peasant, who fancies the souls of his forefathers creeping in and out behind the saints' pictures on the little icon-shelf, puts crumbs of cake there for them. One has only to cross the Channel to see how the ancient feast of the dead still keeps its primitive character in the festival of All Souls, which is its modern representative; even at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise they still put cakes and sweetmeats on the graves, and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table, for the souls of the dead of the family who will come to visit their home. All this belongs to the ancestor-worship or religion of the divine dead, which from remote antiquity has been, as it is even now, the main faith of the larger half of mankind. But this worship does

not come only from family affection, for the ghosts of the dead are looked upon as divine beings, powerful both for good and harm. The North American Indian, who prays to the spirits of his forefathers to give him good weather or luck in hunting, if he happens to fall into the fire will believe he has neglected to make some offering to the spirits, and they have pushed him in to punish him. In Guinea the negroes who regularly bring food and drink to the images of their dead relatives look to them for help in the trials of life, and in times of peril or distress crowds of men and women may be seen on the hill-tops or the skirts of the forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones on the spirits of their ancestors. Such accounts help us to understand what real meaning there is in the ancestor-worship which to a Chinese or Hindu is the first business of life, and how the pious rites for the dead ancestors or lares formed the very bond which held a Roman family together. Our modern minds have rather lost the sense of this, and people often think the apotheosis of a dead Roman emperor to have been a mere act of insane pride, whereas in fact it was an idea understood by any barbarian, that at death the great chief should pass into as great a deity.

That barbarians should imagine the manes or ghosts of their dead to be such active powerful beings, arises naturally from their notions of the soul; but this requires a word of explanation. As during life the soul exercises power over the body, so after death when become a ghost it is believed to keep its activity and power. Such ghosts interfering in the affairs of the living are usually called good and evil spirits, or demons. There is no clear distinction made between ghosts and demons; in fact, savages generally consider the demons who help or plague them to be souls of dead men. Good or evil, the man keeps after death the temper he had in mortal

life. Not long ago, in South India, where the natives are demon-worshippers, it was found that they had lately built a shrine of which the deity was the ghost of a British officer, a mighty hunter, whose votaries, mindful of his tastes in life, were laying on his altar offerings of cheroots and brandy. The same man will be a good spirit to his friends and an evil spirit to his enemies, and even to his own people he may be sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, as when the Zulus believe that the shades of dead warriors of their tribe are among them in battle and lead them to victory; but if these ghostly allies are angry and turn their backs, the fight will go against them. When people like the American Indians or the African negroes believe that the air around them is swarming with invisible spirits, this is not nonsense. They mean that life is full of accidents which do not happen of themselves; and when in their rude philosophy they say the spirits make them happen, this is finding the most distinct causes which their minds can understand. This is most plainly seen in what uncivilized men believe about disease. We have noticed already that they account for fainting or trance by supposing the soul to leave the body for a time, and here it may be added that weakness or failure of health is in the same way thought to be caused by the soul or part of it going out. In these cases, to bring the soul back is the ordinary method of cure, as where the North American medicine-man will pretend to catch his patient's truant soul and put it back into his head, or in Fiji a sick native has been seen lying on his back, bawling to his own soul to come back to him. But in other conditions of disease the patient's behaviour seems rather that of a man who has got a soul in him that is not his proper soul. In any painful illness, especially when the sick man is tossing and shaking in fever, or

writhing in convulsions on the ground, or when in delirium or delusion he no longer thinks his own thoughts or speaks with his own voice, but with distorted features and strange, unearthly tones breaks into wild raving, then the explanation which naturally suggests itself is that another spirit has entered into or possessed him. Any one who watches the symptoms of a hysterical-epileptic patient, or a maniac, will see how naturally in the infancy of medical science demoniacal possession came to be the accepted theory of disease, and the exorcism or expulsion of these demons the ordinary method of treatment. It is so among savages, as when a sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him and is gnawing his liver ; or when in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever. Such ideas were at home in ancient history, as in the well-known Egyptian memorial tablet of the time of Rameses XII (12th century B.C.) to be seen in the Paris Library, and translated in Records of the Past, where the Egyptian god Khons was sent in his ark to cure the little princess Bentaresh of the evil movement in her limbs. When he came, the demon said, "Great god who chasest demons, I am thy slave, I will go to the place whence I came." Then they made a sacrifice for that spirit, and he went in peace, leaving the patient cured. As far back as the history of medicine reaches, we find the contest between this old spirit-theory of disease and the newer ideas of the physicians, with their diet and drugs; and though the doctors have now taken the upper hand, yet in any nation short of the most civilized the earlier notions may still be found unchanged. When Prof. Bastian, the anthropologist, was travelling in Burma, his cook had an apoplectic fit, and the wife was doing her best to

him go! Grip him not so Ah, how good that tastes!" disease prevails, the patients'

appease the offended demon who had brought it on, by putting little heaps of coloured rice for him, and prayers, "Oh, ride him not! Ah, let hard! Thou shalt have rice! In countries where this theory of own delusions work in with and confirm it in most striking ways. As fully persuaded as the bystanders of the reality of their demons, they will recognise them in the figures they dream of or see in their delirium, and what is more, under delusion or diseased imagination they so lose their sense of being themselves, as to talk with what they believe to be the voice of the demon within them, answering in its name, just as the sick princess did in Syria three thousand years ago. Englishmen in India and the far East often have the opportunity of being present at these strange old-world scenes, and hearing the demon-voice whisper, or squeak, or roar, out of the patient's mouth, that he is the spirit so-andso, and tell what he is come for; at last, when satisfied with what he wants, or subdued by the exorcist's charms and threats, the demon consents to go, and then the patient leaves off his frantic screams and raving, his convulsive writhing quiets down, and he sinks into an exhausted sleep, often relieved for a time when the malady is one where mental treatment is effective. Nor is it necessary to go to India or China for illustrations of this early theory of disease. In Spain the priests still go on exorcising devils out of the mouths and feet of epileptic patients, though this will probably cease in a few years, when it is known how successfully that hitherto intractable disease may be treated with potassium bromide.

In other ways the notion of spirits serves to account for whatever happens. That certain unusually fierce wolves or tigers are man-eaters" is explained by the belief that the