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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree utter its complaint
