At this point it may be well to ask what was the original idea of the virtue conveyed by going round a piece of land with victims to be sacrificed at the end of the circuit. Such circuitous processions, with or without victims, are to be found in all countries: perhaps the instance most familiar to all of us is that round the walls of Jericho, repeated seven times--the mystic number--in order to destroy their defensive power. But Roman folklore itself, preserved in great abundance by Pliny, supplies an example which goes some way, I think, to show the original nature of the process. Pliny tells us that if a woman in a certain condition, with bare feet and streaming hair, walked round a field, it was completely protected against insects.[121] The act of passing round a crop served as a charm to keep off noxious things--live insects in historical times, noxious spirits, if I am right, in the dawn of agriculture. The charm lay in the condition of the woman, as Dr. Frazer has abundantly shown in _The Golden Bough_ (iii, ed. 2, p. 232 foll.), where he has quoted this passage of Pliny and others from the Roman writers on agriculture. Some power of a similar kind there must have been also in the victims about to be slain; they were chosen according to rule, and under favourable auspices (if we may argue back from the ritual of the city to that of the farm): they were therefore holy, and their blood was about to be shed at one point in the line of circuit. We have here, indeed, passed beyond the region of magic, but we are still in that early stage of religion when a magical idea is at the bottom of the ceremony, though fast losing itself in ideas more advanced and rational. This religious process, the fencing out of hostile spirits by a boundary-line, and the discovery of the proper formulae for preserving it and all within it, may and indeed must have been the work of ages. But once discovered, the principle of it could be applied to any land or other property of man, and also to man himself. Let us now take some examples of such extensions of the simple practice of the farm. The farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called _pagi_; and these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. So at least we can hardly doubt, though we have no explicit account of the processional character of the _lustratio pagi_. When Ovid, under date of the Paganalia (Jan. 24-6), describes the lustratio, he writes: Pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni, Et date paganis annua liba focis: but does not make it clear that he uses _lustrare_ in the sense of a procession with the suovetaurilia. Nor can we be sure that the beautiful passage in the first _Georgic_ (338 foll.), beginning, ‘In primis venerare deos,’ refers to a _lustratio pagi_, though Wissowa seems to imply it,[122] and the lines