Let us concede for the moment what some of us would be inclined to doubt, viz. that prayers and sacrifice offered to a human being, alive or dead, is religion; and let us enquire whether this form of religion is evolved out of magic. The magic here is quite clear: stones resembling taros are buried in the taro field to promote the growth of taros. That is an application of the principle that like produces like which might be employed by men who had never heard of ancestor worship or of any kind of religion, and who had never uttered prayers or offered sacrifices of any kind. Next, the religious element, according to Dr. Frazer, is also quite clear: it consists in offering sacrifices to the dead with the prayer or the words, "Here are your offerings, in order that the crop of yams may be good." Now, it is not suggested, even by Dr. Frazer, that this religious element is a form of magic or is in any way developed out of or evolved from magic. On the contrary, if this element is religious--indeed, whether it be really religious or not--it is obviously entirely distinct and different from sympathetic or hom[oe]opathic magic. The mere fact that the magical {94} rite of burying in the taro fields stones which resemble taros has to be supplemented by rites which are, on Dr. Frazer's own showing, non-magical, shows that the primitive belief in this application of the principle that like produces like was already dying out, and was in process of becoming a mere survival. Suppose that it died out entirely and the rite of burying stones became an unintelligible survival, or was dropped altogether, and suppose that the prayers and sacrifices remained in possession of the field, which would be the more correct way of stating the facts, to say that the magic had died out and its place had been taken by something totally different, viz. religion; or that what was magic had become religion, that magic and religion are but two manifestations, two stages, in the evolution of the same principle? The latter statement was formally rejected by Dr. Frazer in the second edition of his _Golden Bough_, when he declared that he had come to recognise "a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion" (Preface, xvi). His words, therefore, justify us in assuming that when he speaks, in his _Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship_, of the "transition from magic to religion," he cannot {95} mean that magic becomes religion, or that religion is evolved out of magic, for the "distinction and even opposition of principle" between the two is "fundamental." He can, therefore, only mean that magic is followed and may be driven out by something which is fundamentally opposed to it, viz. religion.