Ovid, in his ‘Metamorphoses,’ has told us how, after Daphne had been changed into a Laurel, the nymph-tree still panted and heaved her heart; how, when Phaethon’s grief-stricken sisters were transformed into Poplars, they continued to shed tears, which were changed into amber; how Myrrha, metamorphosed into a tree, still wept, in her bitter grief, the precious drops which retain her name; how Dryope, similarly transformed, imparted her life to the branches, which glowed with a human heat; and how the tree into which the nymph Lotis had been changed, shook with sudden horror when its blossoms were plucked and blood welled from the broken stalks. In these poetic conceptions it is easy to see the embodiment of a belief very rife among the Greeks and Romans that trees and shrubs were tenanted in some mysterious manner by spirits. Thus Virgil tells us that when Æneas had travelled far in search of the abodes of the blest-- “He came to groves, of happy souls the rest; To evergreens, the dwellings of the blest.” Nor was this notion confined simply to the Greeks and Romans, for among the ancients generally there existed a wide-spread belief that trees were either the haunts of disembodied spirits, or contained within their material growth the actual spirits themselves. Evelyn tells us that “the Ethnics do still repute all great trees to be divine, and the habitations of souls departed: these the Persians call _Pir_ and _Imàm_.” The Persians, however, entertaining a profound regard for trees of unusual magnitude, were of opinion that only the spirits of the pure and holy inhabited them. In this respect they differed from the Indians, who believed that both good and evil spirits dwelt in trees. Thus we read in the story of a _Brahmadaitya_ (a Bengal folk-tale), of a certain Banyan-tree haunted by a number of ghosts who wrung the necks of all who were rash enough to approach the tree during the night. And, in the same tale, we are told of a Vakula-tree (_Mimusops Elengi_) which was the haunt of a _Brahmadaitya_ (the ghost of a Brahman who dies unmarried), who was a kindly and well-disposed spirit. In another folk-tale we are introduced to the wife of a Brahman who was attacked by a _Sankchinni_, or female ghost, inhabiting a tree near the Brahman’s house, and thrust by the vindictive ghost into a hole in the trunk. The Rev. Lal Behari Day explains that _Sankchinnis_ or _Sankhachurnis_ are female ghosts of white complexion, who usually stand in the dead of night at the foot of trees. Sometimes these tree-spirits appear to leave their usual sylvan abode and enter into human beings, in which case an exorcist is employed, who detects the presence of the spirit by lighting a piece of Turmeric root, which is an infallible test, as no ghost can put up with the smell of burnt Turmeric.