The first thing to be noticed is the fluidity of the savage concept of personality. It is not confined within the bounds of one stable and relatively unchangeable body. You may quite easily be transformed, like the hero of Apuleius’ tale, into an ass. Your next-door neighbour, for whom you have the profoundest respect as a prosperous man of business and a churchwarden of exemplary piety, may startle you some morning with a sudden change into a noisy little street-arab, not a tenth {31} of his own portly dimensions, turning a wheel all down his garden path, or into a melancholy cow cropping a bare pittance of grass from his closely trimmed lawn. He and his magnificent wife may even become, like Philemon and Baucis, an oak and a lime-tree before your eyes, or a pair of standing stones upon the moor. None of these metamorphoses would be accounted impossible by peoples in the lower culture. To them the essential incident of the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would be mere commonplace. The personality which they have known running in one mould can, in their opinion, be directed into, and will run as freely in, another mould, and yet be the same. So hard do such archaic beliefs die, that in remote parts of our own country it is still firmly believed that a witch may assume the form of a hare, and if any bold sportsman succeed in wounding the animal, the injury will afterwards be found on the witch’s proper person, testifying beyond dispute to the preservation of her individuality under the temporary change of shape and species.