Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/33

Rh The President also read the following letters from Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. J. G. Frazer:—

The President having communicated the substance of this letter to Mr. Frazer, and suggested that the explanation lay in the hungry man looking on the trees, which thereby became sympathetically starved, and so died, Mr. Frazer replied:—

November 1st, 1896.

The superstition you mention was unknown to me, but your explanation of it seems highly probable.

As explained by you, the superstition is a very interesting example of the supposed sympathetic connection between a man and a tree. As you say, it bears very closely on my explanation of the connection between the priest of Diana at Aricia and the sacred tree, he having to be always in the prime of health and vigour in order that the tree might be so too. I am pleased to find my theory (which I confess often seems to me far-fetched, so remote is it from our nineteenth century educated ways of thought) confirmed by evidence so near home. It is one more indication