with death the worship of the sun, moon, and stars,[96] or even to stigmatize it as fetish-worship. The meaning of the word fetish has become so blurred by indiscriminate use that there is a temptation to discard it altogether. It is frequently applied to all concrete objects of devotion, including not only great nature-gods, like the earth and sun, but their symbols, images, and seats of their real presence, which have no intrinsic divinity of their own, and are only worshipped by reason of their association with genuine deities. The same objects, after their association with the God has been forgotten and they are blindly adored as if they were themselves Gods, form a third class of fetishes. The sword of the shrine of Atsuta is an example. Probably originally an offering and then a _shintai_, it is still worshipped, for no known reason except, perhaps, an empiric belief in the efficacy of prayers addressed to it. Implements of trade, honoured for the help which they render to man, are a fourth class. To these we may add a fifth, consisting of stones, sticks, feathers, &c., worshipped for their imaginary virtues or for no definite reason at all. The indiscriminate application of the term fetish to objects of all these five classes is highly inconvenient, especially when we come to discuss the question whether fetishism is a primitive form of religion. The answer depends entirely on the kind of fetish which is intended. If the word is used at all, it would be better to confine it to the last three of these classes.