But before reflection had risen to this level, and among the savage and semi-barbarous people of the present day, we find much more crude speculations, which, in the main, correspond with the kindred creeds of Animism and Totemism. When life and magical powers were attributed to inanimate objects, nothing was more natural than to suppose that stones and trees might be converted into men and women, and conversely men and women into trees and stones. Thus we find the stone theory very widely diffused. Even with a people so far advanced as the early Greeks, it meets us in the celebrated fable of Deucalion and Pyrrha peopling the earth by throwing stones behind them, which turned into men and women; and the same myth, of stones turning into the first men, meets us at the present day in almost every reliable myth of creation, brought home by missionaries and anthropologists from Africa, America, and Polynesia. In some cases trees take the place of stones, and transformations of men into both are among the commonest occurrences. From Daphne into a laurel, and Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, down to the Cornish maidens transformed into a circle of stones for dancing on Sunday, we find everywhere that wherever natural objects present any resemblance to the human figure, such myths sprung up spontaneously in all ages and countries. Another great school of creation-myths originates in the widespread institution of the totem. It is a step in advance of the pure fetich-worship of stocks and stones, to conceive of animals as having thought and language, and being in fact men under a different form. From this it is a short step to endowing them with magical attributes and supernatural powers, adopting them as patrons of tribes and families, and finally considering them as ancestors. Myths of this kind are common among the lower races, especially in America, where many of the tribes considered themselves as descendants of some great bear or elk, or of some extremely wise fox or beaver, and held this belief so firmly, that intermarriage among members of the same totem was considered to be incestuous. The same system prevails among most races at an equally low or lower stage of civilization, as in Australia; and there are traces of its having existed among old civilized nations at remote periods. Thus the animal-worship of Egypt was probably a survival of the old faith in totems, differing among different clans, which was so firmly rooted in the popular traditions, that the priests had to accommodate their religious conceptions to it, as the Christian fathers did with so many pagan superstitions. The division of the twelve tribes of Israel seems also to have been originally totemic, judging from the old saga in which Jacob gives them his blessing, identifying Judah with a lion, Dan with an adder, and so on. And even at the present day, the crest of the Duke of Sutherland carries us back to the time when the wild-cat