The general conclusion I would incline to draw from all these instances is briefly this. Cultivation probably began with the accidental sowing of grains upon the tumuli of the dead. Gradually it was found that by extending the dug or tilled area and sowing it all over, a crop would grow upon it, provided always a corpse was buried in the centre. In process of time divine corpses were annually provided for the purpose, and buried with great ceremony in each field. By-and-bye it was found sufficient to offer up a single victim for a whole tribe or village, and to divide his body piecemeal among the fields of the community. But the crops that grew in such fields were still regarded as the direct gifts of the dead and deified victims, whose soul was supposed to animate and fertilize them. As cultivation spread, men became familiarised at last with the conception of the seed and the ploughing as the really essential elements in the process; but they still continued to attach to the victim a religious importance, and to believe in the necessity of his presence for good luck in the harvest. With the gradual mitigation of savagery an animal sacrifice was often substituted for a human one; but the fragments of the animal were still distributed through the fields with a mimic or symbolical burial, just as the fragments of the man-god had formerly been distributed. Finally, under the influence of Christianity and other civilised religions, an effigy was substituted for a human victim, though an animal sacrifice was often retained side by side with it, and a real human being was playfully killed in pantomime. In early stages, however, I note that the field or garden sometimes retains the form of a tumulus. Thus Mr. Turner, the Samoan missionary, writes of the people of Tana, in the New Hebrides: “They bestow a great deal of labour on their yam plantations, and keep them in fine order. You look over a reed {298}fence, and there you see ten or twenty mounds of earth, some of them seven feet high and sixty in circumference. These are heaps of loose earth without a single stone, all thrown up by the hand. In the centre they plant one of the largest yams whole, and round the sides some smaller ones.” This looks very much like a tumulus in its _temenos_. I should greatly like to know whether a victim is buried in it. I may add that the idea of the crop being a gift from the deified ancestor or the divine-human victim is kept up in the common habit of offering the first-fruits to the dead, or to the gods, or to the living chief, their representative and descendant. Of the equivalence of these three ceremonies, I have given some evidence in my essay on Tree-Worship appended to my translation of the _Attis_ of Catullus. For example, Mr. Turner says of these same Tanese in the New Hebrides: