Finally, we may here notice the fifty-second of Plutarch's Questions, wherein he wonders why a dog was sacrificed to Genita Mana, and a prayer made to her that none born in the house should become Manes. Genita Mana was, as her name plainly indicates, a spirit of birth and of death; and the prayer was such as might properly be offered to her. The sacrifice may be explained on the principle laid down by Professor Robertson Smith,[39] that an animal sacrificed to a deity was itself originally the deity. That one and the same spirit should have to do with "the child from the womb and the ghost from the tomb," points to the existence of a belief among the Romans similar to one held by the Algonkins. "Algonkin women who wished to become mothers flocked to the side of a dying person, in the hope of receiving and being impregnated by the passing soul."[40] Let us now turn to another point in which early Italian beliefs and modern folk-lore mutually illustrate each other. On the origin of fairies various theories have been held, and without denying that fairies are sometimes the representatives of earlier gods, sometimes of still earlier satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and wild men of the wood, we may recognise that they are sometimes spirits of the departed. In the first place, as the Italians called the dead "the good," _manes_, so in England and in Ireland fairies are "the good people."[41] Next, fairies are small; and the savage conceives the soul of man as a smaller man. It is, according to Hurons, "a complete little model of the man himself," like the man, but smaller, of course, because, as the Australian blacks explain, it is within the man's breast.[42] According to Kaffir ideas, the world of _manes_ is exactly like that of the living, only much smaller, and the dead are themselves but mannikins.[43] Again, the Teutonic house-spirit on the one hand is admittedly a deceased ancestor, and on the other is an indubitable fairy. Further, fairies are sometimes explicitly stated in folk-tales to be deceased spirits.[44]