everywhere in history and the world we find magic and religion side by side, at one time allies, at another enemies, now playing into each other’s hands, now cursing, objurgating, and vainly attempting to exterminate one another. On the whole the lower intelligences cling closely, though secretly, to magic, while the higher intelligences have discerned the vanity of its pretensions and turned to religion instead. The result has been that beliefs and rites which were purely magical in origin often contract in course of time a religious character; they are modified in accordance with the advance of thought, they are translated into terms of gods and spirits, whether good and beneficent, or evil and malignant. We may surmise, though we cannot prove, that a change of this sort has come over the minds of many races with regard to sexual morality. At some former time, perhaps, straining a real analogy too far, they believed that those relations of the human sexes which for any reason they regarded as right and natural had a tendency to promote sympathetically the propagation of animals and plants and thereby to ensure a supply of food for the community; while on the contrary they may have imagined that those relations of the human sexes which for any reason {101} they deemed wrong and unnatural had a tendency to thwart and impede the propagation of animals and plants and thereby to diminish the common supply of food. [Sidenote: Such a belief would account both for the horror with which many savages regard such crimes, and for the severity with which they punish them.] Such a belief, it is obvious, would furnish a sufficient motive for the strict prohibition of what were deemed improper relations between men and women; and it would explain the deep horror and detestation with which sexual irregularities are viewed by many, though certainly not by all, savage tribes. For if improper relations between the human sexes prevent animals and plants from multiplying, they strike a fatal blow at the existence of the tribe by cutting off its supply of food at the roots. No wonder, therefore, that wherever such superstitions have prevailed the whole community, believing its very existence to be put in jeopardy by sexual immorality, should turn savagely on the culprits, and beat, burn, drown or otherwise exterminate them in order to rid itself of so dangerous a pollution. And when with the advance of knowledge men began to perceive the mistake they had made in imagining that the commerce of the human sexes could affect the propagation of animals and plants, they would still through long habit be so inured to the idea of the wickedness of certain sexual relations that they could not dismiss it from their minds, even when they discerned the fallacious nature of the reasoning by which they had arrived at it. The old practice would therefore stand, though the old theory had fallen: the old rules of sexual morality would continue to be observed, but if