All over the world, wherever cultivation exists, a special class of corn-gods or grain-gods is found, deities of the chief foodstuff,--be it maize, or dates, or plantain, or rice--and it is a common feature of all these gods that they are represented by human or quasi-human victims, who are annually slain at the time of sowing. These human gods {273}are believed to reappear once more in the form of the crop that rises from their sacred bodies; their death and resurrection are celebrated in festivals; and they are eaten and drunk sacramentally by their votaries, in the shape of first-fruits, or of cakes and wine, or of some other embodiment of the divine being. We have therefore to enquire into the origin of this curious superstition, which involves, as it seems to me, the very origin of cultivation itself as a human custom. And I must accordingly bespeak my readers’ indulgence if I diverge for a while into what may seem at first a purely botanical digression. Most people must have been struck by the paradox of cultivation. A particular plant in a state of nature, let us say, grows and thrives only in water, or in some exceedingly moist and damp situation. You take up this waterside plant with a trowel one day, and transfer it incontinently to a dry bed in a sun-baked garden; when lo! the moisture-loving creature, instead of withering and dying, as one might naturally expect of it, begins to grow apace, and to thrive to all appearance even better and more lustily than in its native habitat. Or you remove some parched desert weed from its arid rock to a moist and rainy climate; and instead of dwindling, as one imagines it ought to do under the altered conditions, it spreads abroad in the deep rich mould of a shrubbery bed, and attains a stature impossible to its kind in its original surroundings. Our gardens, in fact, show us side by side plants which, in the wild state, demand the most varied and dissimilar habitats. Siberian squills blossom amicably in the same bed with Italian tulips; the alpine saxifrage spreads its purple rosettes in friendly rivalry with the bog-loving marsh-marigold or the dry Spanish iris. The question, therefore, sooner or later occurs to the enquiring mind: How can they all live together so well here in man’s domain, when in the outside world each demands and exacts so extremely different and specialised a situation?