I have now given some brief account of the most remarkable examples of the characteristic type of lustration in Italy, and more especially at Rome; and it only remains for me to sum up in outline what I have been saying. We began with the ideas of purification which were common to the Italians and other primitive peoples, and which have left traces here and there in the public and private ritual of the Romans, but without showing any great vital force, such as might enable them to develop into matters of religious or ethical importance in Roman life. We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice. Then we saw how this same practice was retained in the service of the State, and applied to the foundation of a city, to its land, to the circuit of its walls, to its people in the form of the men capable of carrying arms, to the horses, the arms, and the trumpets of this host. In conclusion, I must ask the question whether this impressive ritual of lustratio ever came to have any religious or moral import for the Roman people. Undoubtedly the idea which lay at the root of it, the protection of the city and its inhabitants from hostile spirits or strange gods, disappeared from the Roman mind at an early period among the governing and better educated classes. In one point only, so far as I know, can we detect a survival of it,--namely, in the persistence of the pontifices in refusing to admit new gods within the sacred circle of the pomerium; they might be taken into the Society of Roman deities, but they must be settled in temples placed _outside_ that boundary line. But as early as the second Punic war this old rule began to be broken, and in 205 B.C. even the mystic stone of the Magna Mater of the Phrygians was brought within the pomerium and settled in the heart of the city on the Palatine. And from that time onwards, whatever may have been the notions about such things of the ignorant Latin population, the old ideas assuredly vanished utterly from the minds of those who were in charge of the State and its religion.