It is not necessary to occupy much space with the savage and modern ghosts of men that reappear in the guise of the lower animals. Among savages, who believe themselves to be descended from beasts, nothing can be more natural than the hypothesis that the souls revert to bestial shapes. The Zulus say their ancestors were serpents, and in harmless serpents they recognise the dead friend or kinsman returning to the family kraal. The Indian tribes of North-Western America claim descent from various creatures, and under the shape of these creatures their dead reappear. The lack of distinction, in the savage mind, between man and beast makes ghost stories of this species natural among savages. But it is curious, in Miss Burne’s volume on _Shropshire Folk-Lore_, to find that almost all the Shropshire ghosts, even of known persons recently deceased, display themselves in the form of beasts, while ghosts in human guise are comparatively rare exceptions. Thus (p. 111) the wicked squire of Bagley, after his death, _came_ as a monstrous and savage bull. He was “laid” in church, where he cracked the walls by the vigor of his resistance. “There are believers in this story who affirm that, were the stone to be loosened, the bull would come forth again by many degrees worse than he was at the first.” “It is not an invariable rule that ghosts should take the form of animals.... A road near Hodnet is haunted by the ghost of a farmer who, for no known reason, comes again with a horse’s head,” like the Phigalian Demeter! The ghost (limited) of seven illegitimate children _came_ as a cat! A man drowned in the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal appears (p. 107) as a monkey; and so on. So common, in France, are human ghosts in bestial form, that M. D’Assier has invented a Darwinian way of accounting for the phenomena. M. D’Assier, a Positivist, is a believer in ghosts, but not in the immortality of the soul. He suggests that the human _revenants_ in the guise of sheep, cows, and shadowy creatures may be accounted for by a kind of Atavism, or “throwing back,” on the side of the spirit to the lower animal forms out of which humanity was developed! The chief or only interest of these bogies in bestial shape lies in the proof they afford of the tenacity of tradition. It is impossible to imagine the amount of evidence capable of proving that what seems a bull is really the ghost of a wicked squire, as people think in Shropshire. But the prevalence of a superstition like this demonstrates that ideas originally conceived by savages, and natural or inevitable in the savage mental condition, may survive in the rustic peoples of the most civilised nations.