It is now the mode to trace all ceremonial to self-interest, principally to the self-interest of fear or food. But on this arbitrary, stale, and ancient theory[80] how is it possible to account for the almost universal reverence for stone or rock? Rocks yield neither food, nor firing, nor clothing, nor do they ever inflict injuries: why, then, should the artless savage trouble to gratify or conciliate such innocuous and unprofitable objects? The same question may be raised in other directions, notably that of the oak tree. Here the accepted supposition is that the oak was revered because it was struck more frequently by lightning than any other tree, but if this untoward occurrence really proves the oak tree was the favourite of the Fire God surely it was an instance of affection very brilliantly dissembled. Sir James Frazer has used his _Golden Bough_ as he found it employed by Virgil--as a talisman which led to the gloomy and depressing underworld. In Celtic myth the Silver Bough played a less sinister part, and figures as a fairy talisman to music and delight. Whether the appeal of Sir Gilbert Murray meets with any sympathy and response, and whether the written signs in our old poetry will ever be enshrined back into living thought and feeling remains to be seen. I think they will, and that the better sense of English intellectualism will sooner or later recoil from the present mud-and-dust theories of protoplasm for, as has been well said, "Materialism considered as a system of philosophy never attempts to explain the _Why_? of things". Certainly protoplasm has unravelled nothing, nor possibly can. One of our standard archæologists lamented a few decades ago: "As the Germans have decreed this it is in vain to dispute it, and not worth while to attempt it". But the German, an indefatigable plodder, is but a second-rate _thinker_, and the time must inevitably come when English scholars will deem it well worth while to unhitch their waggons from Germania. With characteristic assurance the Teutonic _litterati_ are still prattling of The Fatherland as a "centre" of civilisation, and are pluming themselves upon the "spiritual values" given to mankind by Germany. Some of us are not conscious of these "spiritual values," but that German scholarship has poison-gassed vast tracts of modern thought is evident enough. The theories of Mannhardt, elaborated by Sir James Frazer and transmuted by him into the pellucid English of _The Golden Bough_, have admittedly blighted the fair humanities of old religion into a dull catalogue of common things,[81] and no one more eloquently deplores the situation than Sir James Frazer himself. As he says: "It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects thankless task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which as in a strong tower the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought refuge from the storm and stress of life. Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the