Perhaps the earliest of all the elements to receive this adoration was _fire_. With its discovery man first entered into human social life. Everywhere and in all peoples it has been in a manner sacred. With the Kafirs every religious ceremony must be performed in front of a fire.[166] In the Rig Veda the crackling of the blazing twigs is regarded as the speech of the gods, just as it is to-day in Borneo. The institutions of the sacred fire and the perpetual fire recur in every continent, and we have but to enter a church of the Roman communion on the morning of Holy Saturday to witness the impressive ceremonies with which the creation of the “new fire” is to this day celebrated in our midst. The custom of passing an infant “through the fire” was as much practised by the Aztecs in Mexico as by the Moloch worshippers of Syria.[167] The Peruvians held that divine inspiration was to be obtained by sacrifices to the god of fire; and those of Guatemala adored it as their greatest and oldest deity.[168] In all these and in a hundred other examples which I might cite, the main thought is that in fire and its products—warmth, heat, light, flame—lies the essential principle of life; and the worship of Life was the central, positive conception in primitive ceremonies. The _air_ to early man is recognised in motion as the winds; and these, in his myths and rites, occupy a conspicuous position. Conceived as four, blowing more or less directly from the four corners of the earth-plane, they are the rain-bringers, the gods of the seasons and the year, controlling the products of the harvest and hence the happiness and life of man. The outlines of the story are the same whether we listen to the Maoris of New Zealand, who tell us of Tawhiri-matea, god of the winds, who divided his progeny into four broods and sent one to each quarter of the compass; to the Eskimos, who narrate just the same of Sillam Innua, owner of the winds, and his four sons; or to a score of like myths which I could quote from American storyland.[169] The house of the winds, where they are imagined to be stored, a mythical notion which Professor Schwartz has shown to be so wide-spread in the Old World, recurs with scarcely less frequency in the New World.[170] _Water_, as moisture, the dew, the fertilising showers, the green bordered streams and lakes, was ever connected with vegetable life and its symbols. In most cosmogonies the land rose from the bosom of some primal sea; in most primitive geographies the solid earth is surrounded by the mighty ocean-stream which stretches out to the uttermost space. “All of us,” said the Aztecs, “are children of water.” Hence the spring, the stream, the lake, was ever regarded as a beneficent being, who should rightly call for the adoration of the true in soul. Tlaloc, god of rains, and the many-named gods of the heavenly vase in which the rains were stored on high, were conspicuous figures in the American pantheon.[171]