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doll attached to it. In short we are driven to regard the expulsion of Death and the bringing in of Summer as, in some cases at least, merely another form of that death and resuscitation of the spirit of vegetation in spring which we saw enacted in the killing and resurrection of the Wild Man.^[1] The burial and resurrection of the Carnival is probably another way of expressing the same idea. The burying of the representative of the Carnival under a dung-heap is natural, if he is supposed to possess a quickening and fertilising influence like that ascribed to the effigy of Death. By the Esthonians, indeed, the straw figure which is carried out of the village in the usual way on Shrove Tuesday is not called the Carnival, but the Wood-spirit (Metsik), and the identity of it with the wood-spirit is further shown by fixing it to the top of a tree in the wood, where it remains for a year, and is besought almost daily with prayers and offerings to protect the herds; for like a true wood-spirit the Metsik is a patron of cattle. Sometimes the Metsik is made of sheafs of corn.^[2] Therefore, we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer, are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs described. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is hardly primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in their origin the

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1. Above, p. 243.
2. Wiedemann, Aus dem inneren und äusseren Leben der Ehsten, p. 353; Holzmayer, “Osiliana,” in Verhandlungen der gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft zu Dorpat, vii. Heft 2, p. 10 sq.; W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus, p. 407 sq.