holy water to keep the spirits from breaking out from prison, and the priest smelt brimstone from the dark cavity below, which, however, unfortunately turned out to be a cellar. In still later times, the yearly pilgrimage of tens of thousands of votaries to the holy place has kept up this interesting survival from the lower culture, whereby a communication may still be traced, if not from Earth to Hades, at least from the belief of the New Zealander to that of the Irish peasant.
To study and compare the ideal regions where man has placed the abodes of departed souls is not an unprofitable task. True, geography has now mapped out into mere earth and water the space that lay beyond the narrower sea and land known to the older nations, and astronomy no longer recognizes the flat earth trodden by men as being the roof of subterranean halls, nor the sky as being a solid firmament, shutting out men's gaze from strata or spheres of empyræan regions beyond. Yet if we carry our minds back to the state of knowledge among the lower races, we shall not find it hard to understand the early conceptions as to the locality of the regions beyond the grave. They are no secrets of high knowledge made known to sages of old; they are the natural fancies which childlike ignorance would frame in any age. The regularity with which such conceptions repeat themselves over the world bears testimony to the regularity of the processes by which opinion is formed among mankind. At the same time, the student who carefully compares them will find in them a perfect illustration of an important principle, widely applicable to the general theory of the formation of human opinion. When a problem has presented itself to mankind at large, susceptible of a number of solutions about equally plausible, the result is that the several opinions thus produced will be found lying scattered in country after country. The problem here is, given the existence of souls of the dead who from time to time visit the living, where is the home of these ghosts? Why men in one district should have preferred
