Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies, mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the _Voyage of the Beagle_ describes how the Indians of South America would greet with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part of the Pampas; libations of brandy and maté were poured into a hole at its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr. Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the “prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by spirits. I need not multiply {144}instances; they may be found by the hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections. Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship in its undisguised early native development. I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.