"It seems probable that the early _Muselmans_ who invaded _Iran_ or Persia in the seventh century, found this invocation of trees established there from ages long elapsed, and that they soon adopted the popular superstition (if, indeed, some practices of the same or of a similar nature were not already frequent among themselves), reconciling it to their own faith, by addressing the Almighty, or, as we have seen, the intermediatory spirits of the saints. By the ancient Persians, especially those who professed Magism as reformed according to Zeratusht or Zoroaster, image-worship and other forms of gross idolatry, were held in as much abhorrence as afterwards by the Muselmans themselves; and they contemplated the Sun and its representative, material Fire, with veneration, merely as bright symbols of the sole invisible God. Yet in some of those sacred books which their descendants the _Gabrs_ and Parsis attribute to Zeratusht himself (but which we may reasonably suppose were compiled in the third century, from fragments of ancient manuscripts and from tradition); it seems that trees were invoked as _pure_ and _holy_, and that a form of prayer (izeshne) was particularly addressed to _Feroüers_, or spirits of saints through whose influence the trees grew up in purity, and which, placed above those trees as on a throne, were occupied in blessing them. "From want of a more expressive term, I have called the Feroüers, 'spirits,' but it is not easy to describe by one word those imaginary creatures; for, at first, they existed singly; were then united to the beings which they represent, forming, as it would seem, part of their very souls; there are Feroüers of persons not yet born, although properly united only with rational beings, yet they are assigned to water and to trees ('Les saints Feroüers de l'eau et des arbres.'--Zendav. II., p. 284). Some are described as females; all are immortal and powerful, but beneficent; pleased with offerings, they protect their votaries, and are prompt in carrying off the petitions of those who invoke them to the mighty Ormuzd. "Here we find the supposed agency of preternatural beings, intermediate between man and his Creator; and to this I would ascribe an act of the great Xerxes which is represented as extraordinary and even ridiculous; but of which, in my opinion, the motive has not been rightly understood. "To Xerxes I have already alluded as the Persian king, who, almost five centuries before our era, although he may have worshipped God under the symbol of Fire or of the Sun, appears as if willing to propitiate some invisible superhuman power, by offerings suspended from the branches of a tree, in which he believed it resident.