Universal folk-lore, in all its tangled ramifications, bears witness to the truth of this remark. Tutelary animals, of the Puss in Boots type, abound and expatiate there. They are all-contriving and infallible. Their favour leads to fortune and power. They hold the clue to the labyrinth of human destinies. Through their protection the oppressed are rescued, the ragged are clothed in golden raiments, the outwardly despicable win princely honours, and have their names inscribed in the ‘Almanach de Gotha’ of fairy-land. No wonder that such beneficent potentates, albeit feathered or furry, should have been claimed as ancestors and hereditary protectors by human beings full of untutored yearnings for the unattainable. To our ideas, indeed, there seems little comfort or credit to be got out of counting kinship with a beaver, a bear, or an opossum; but things looked differently when the world was young; nor has it yet everywhere grown old. In Australia, black bipeds still own themselves the cousins and clients of kangaroos. American Indians pay homage to ‘manitous’ personally, as well as to ‘totems’ tribally associated with them; and twilight tales are perhaps to this hour whispered in Ireland, about a certain ‘Master of the Rats,’ whose hostility it is eminently undesirable though lamentably easy to incur. Even among Greeks and Romans of the classical age, to say nothing of Aztecs and Alemanni, belief lurked in the preternatural wisdom of certain animals. Their formal worship, most fully elaborated in Egypt, but diffused over ‘Tellus’ orbed ground,’ sprang from the same stock of ideas. To a remarkable extent, the Greeks were exempt from its degrading associations. Their partial survival on Greek soil, as in the veneration at Phigaleia, of the horse-headed Demeter, represented, without doubt, an under-current of aboriginal tradition, reaching back to the Pelasgic fore-time.