Page:Frazer (1890) The Golden Bough (IA goldenboughstudy01fraz).djvu/83

I the field, fearing that if they did so the crop would be all straw and no grain. In Orissa, also, growing rice is “considered as a pregnant woman, and the same ceremonies are observed with regard to it as in the case of human females.”

Conceived as animate, trees are necessarily supposed to feel injuries done to them. When an oak is being felled “it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heard it severall times.” The Ojebways “very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under the axe.” Old peasants in some parts of Austria still believe that forest-trees are animate, and will not allow an incision to be made in the bark without special cause; they have heard from their fathers that the tree feels the cut not less than a wounded man his hurt. In felling a tree they beg its pardon. So in Jarkino the woodman craves pardon of the tree he cuts down. Again, when a tree is cut it is thought to bleed. Some Indians dare not cut a certain plant, because there comes out a red juice which they take for the blood of the plant. In Samoa there was a grove of trees which no one dared cut. Once some strangers tried to do so, but blood flowed from the tree, and the sacrilegious strangers fell ill and died. Till 1855 there was a sacred larch-tree at Nauders, in the Tyrol,