What must be the obvious result? Here, and here alone, {280}the savage quite unconsciously sows seeds upon newly-turned ground, deprived of its weeds, and further manured by the blood and meat of the frequent sacrificial offerings. These seeds must often spring up and grow apace, with a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail to strike the imagination of the primitive hunter. Especially will this be the case with that class of plants which ultimately develop into the food-crops of civilised society. For the peculiarity of these plants is that they are one and all--maize, corn, or rice, pease, beans, or millet--annuals of rapid growth and portentous stature; plants which have thriven in the struggle for existence by laying up large stores of utilisable material in their seeds for the use of the seedling; and this peculiarity enables them to start in life in each generation exceptionally well endowed, and so to compete at an advantage with all their fellows. Seeds of such a sort would thrive exceedingly in the newly-turned and well-manured soil of a grave or barrow; and producing there a quantity of rich and edible grain, would certainly attract the attention of that practical and observant man, the savage. For though he is so incurious about what are non-essentials, your savage is a peculiarly longheaded person about all that concerns his own immediate advantage. What conclusion would at once be forced upon him? That seeds planted in freshly-turned and richly-manured soil produce threefold and fourfold? Nothing of the sort. He knows naught of seeds and manures and soils; he would at once conclude, after his kind, that the dreaded and powerful ghost in the barrow, pleased with the gifts of meat and seeds offered to him, had repaid those gifts in kind by returning grain for grain a hundredfold out of his own body. This original connexion of ideas seems to me fully to explain that curious identification of the ghost or spirit with the corn or other foodstuff which Mr. Frazer has so wonderfully and conclusively elaborated in _The Golden Bough_.