As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be generally recognised, it {135}would be a simple transference of feeling to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave, wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles. Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work _The Hairy Ainu_, figures and describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance; those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and elsewhere.