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What reader, unacquainted with the old doctrine of offerings for the dead, could realize the meaning of its remnants thus lingering in peasants' minds? The survivals from ancient funeral ceremony may here again serve as warnings against attempting to explain relics of intellectual antiquity by viewing them from the changed level of modern opinion.

Having thus surveyed at large the theory of spirits or souls of objects, it remains to point out what, to general students, may seem the most important consideration belonging to it, namely, its close relation to one of the most