Now, if these be the marks whereby gods are distinguished from spirits, I submit that, before the introduction of Greek gods and cults, the Romans had not advanced as far as polytheism, but were still in the purely animistic stage. Here again, to avoid the temptation of interpreting the evidence unduly in favour of the conclusion to which it seems to me to point, I will confine myself to quotations. Ihne (_Hist. of Rome_, i. 118) says that to the Romans, before the period of Hellenic influence, "the gods were only mysterious spiritual beings, without human forms, without human feelings and impulses, without human virtues or weaknesses.... Though the divine beings were conceived as male or female, they did not join in marriage or beget children.... No genuine Roman legend tells of any race of nobles sprung from gods." Again, "The original Roman worship had no images of the gods or houses set apart for them" (Mommsen, i. 183). "A simple spear, even a rough stone, sufficed as a symbol" (Ihne, 119). Roman religion had nothing to do with morality: "it was designed for use in practical life" (_Ibid._ 120). "The religion of Rome had nothing of its own peculiar growth even remotely parallel to the religion of Apollo investing earthly morality with its halo of glory" (Mommsen, 172). Mommsen's observation that "the hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly foreign to the Romans" (174) is explained by the fact that a hero is a being of human origin raised by good deeds to the rank of a god, and the Romans had no gods. Myths about the love-adventures of the gods and theogonies were unknown to early Rome.[12] An Italian cosmogony has not yet been discovered, and even the wide-spread belief in the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth had not been evolved in Italy. In fine "the beings which the Romans worshipped were rather _numina_ than personal gods."[13] Even the spirits whom we can trace back under definite names to the purely Italian period, such as Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, Mars, are not individual, personal beings. Each of these names is the name of a class of spirits. "Each community of course had its own Mars, and deemed him to be the strongest and holiest of all" (Mommsen, i. 175). Each household had its own Vesta. There were many Jupiters, many Junos. In England, in the same way, the name of Puck, who is a definite individual personality in one stage of our fairy mythology, was originally a class-name of the spirits whom, as Burton says in his _Anatomy_, "we commonly call poukes."