This truth cannot be too strongly emphasised. To ignore it is to miss the whole significance of continuity in human institutions and ideas. The ceremonies described do, of course, gather round the fact of sexual development, but they are not concerned with the sexual life, as such. It is sex as a supernatural manifestation that is the vital feature of the situation. The governing idea is that puberty marks the direct association of the individual with a spiritual world to the influence of which the functional changes are due. As more accurate conceptions are formed, the older and inaccurate one is not altogether discarded. It has become incarnate in ceremonies, it is part of the traditional psychic life of the people, and the change is one of transformation rather than of eradication. In later cultural stages the physiological nature of the changes are seen, but they are expressed in terms of religion. Such expressions as "the soul's awareness of God," "the dawning consciousness of religion," etc., take the place of the earlier and more direct animistic interpretation. But the essential misinterpretation is retained, disguised from careless or uninformed people by the use of a modified terminology. But in substance the use made of puberty by organised religious forces remains the same throughout. We have the same absence of a rational explanation in both instances. In the one because the state of knowledge makes any other impossible; in the other because tradition, self-interest, and prejudice prevent its use. It is not only in his physical structure that man carries reminiscences of a lower form of life; such reminders are quite as plentiful in his mental life, and in social institutions.