Some {281}little evidence is even forthcoming that vegetation actually _does_ show exceptional luxuriance on graves and barrows. The Rev. Alexander Stewart of Ballachulish mentions that the milkmaids in Lochaber and elsewhere in the Scotch highlands used to pour a little milk daily from the pail on the “fairy knowes,” or prehistoric barrows; and the consequence was that “these fairy knolls were clothed with a more beautiful verdure than any other spot in the country.” In Fiji, Mr. Fison remarks that yam-plants spring luxuriantly from the heaps of yam presented to ancestral spirits in the sacred stone enclosure or _temenos_; and two or three recent correspondents (since this chapter was first printed in a monthly review) have obligingly communicated to me analogous facts from Madagascar, Central Africa, and the Malay Archipelago. It is clear from their accounts that graves do often give rise to crops of foodstuffs, accidentally springing from the food laid upon them. Just at first, under such circumstances, the savage would no doubt be content merely to pick and eat the seeds that thus grew casually, as it were, on the graves or barrows of his kings and kinsfolk. But in process of time it would almost certainly come about that the area of cultivation would be widened somewhat. The first step toward such widening, I take it, would arise from the observation that cereals and other seeds only throve exceptionally upon newly-made graves, not on graves in general. For as soon as the natural vegetation reasserted itself, the quickening power of the ghost would seem to be used up. Thus it might be found well to keep fresh ghosts always going for agricultural purposes. Hence might gradually arise a habit of making a new grave annually, at the most favourable sowing-time, which last would come to be recognised by half-unconscious experiment and observation. And this new grave, as I shall show reason for believing a little later, would be the grave, not of a person who happened to die then and there accidentally, but {282}of a deliberate victim, slain in order to provide a spirit of vegetation,--an artificial god,--and to make the corn grow with vigour and luxuriance. Step by step, I believe, it would at length be discovered that if only you dug wide enough, the corn would grow well _around_ as well as _upon_ the actual grave of the divine victim. Thus slowly there would develop the cultivated field, the wider clearing, dug up or laboured by hand, and finally the ploughed field, which yet remains a grave in theory and in all essentials.