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Rh study for their illustrations of man's primitive animistic theory of nature. This is remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as inhabited, like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a body, is often hard to determine. Shelley's lines well express a doubting conception familiar to old barbaric thought —

'Whether the sensitive plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.'

But this vagueness is yet again a proof of the principle which I have confidently put forward here, that the conceptions of the inherent soul and of the embodied spirit are but modifications of one and the same deep-lying animistic thought. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe in 'hantu kayu,' i.e. 'tree-spirits,' or 'tree-demons,' which frequent every species of tree, and afflict men with diseases; some trees are noted for the malignity of their demons. Among the Dayaks of Borneo, certain trees possessed by spirits must not be cut down; if a missionary ventured to fell one, any death that happened afterwards would naturally be set down to this crime. The belief of certain Malays of Sumatra is expressly stated, that certain venerable trees are the residence, or rather the material frame, of spirits of the woods. In the Tonga Islands, we hear of natives laying offerings at the foot of particular trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by spirits. So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree utter its complaint