I would suggest, then, that Osiris in his later embodiment {312}was annually renewed as a corn and vine victim. Originally a king of Upper Egypt, or part of it, he was envisaged in later myth as a general culture-god. Isis, his sister and wife, discovered wheat and barley growing wild; and Osiris introduced these grains among his people, who thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and took to grain-growing. An annual victim, most often a stranger, identified with the racial god, was torn to pieces in his place; and Osiris himself was finally merged with the abstract spirit of vegetation, and supposed to be the parent of all trees. Just as the Corinthians, when ordered by an oracle to worship a certain pine tree “equally with the god,” cut it down and made two images of Dionysus out of it, with gilt bodies and red-stained faces; so the Egyptians cut down a pine-tree, took out the heart, made an image of Osiris, and then buried it in the hollow of the tree from which it had been taken. Similar rites obtained in Attis-worship and all alike bear witness to that late and abstract stage of thought where the primitive cultivation-victim has been sublimated and elevated into a generalised god of vegetation in the abstract. But this, which for Mr. Frazer is the starting-point, is for me the goal of the evolution of Osiris. Let us next look very briefly at the case of Adonis. The Adon or Lord commonly known as Thammuz was one of the chief elements in Syrian religion. He was closely connected with the namesake river Adonis, which rose by his grave at the sacred spring of Aphaca. We do not actually know, I believe, of a human Adonis-victim; but his death was annually lamented with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women. Images of him were dressed like corpses, and carried out as if for burial, and then thrown into the sea or into springs. This was evidently a rain charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry country like Syria. And I will add incidentally that I attribute to similar circumstances also some portion at least of the sanctity of rivers. In certain places, the resurrection of the Adonis was {313}celebrated on the succeeding day. At Byblos, he also ascended into heaven before the eyes of his worshippers--a point worth notice from its Christian analogies. The blood-red hue of the river Adonis in spring--really due to the discoloration of the tributary torrents by red earth from the mountains--was set down to the blood of the god Adonis; the scarlet anemone sprang from his wounds. But the scholiast on Theocritus expressly explains the Adonis as “the sown corn;” and that he was “seed,” like the common corn-victims in India and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt from the repeated stories of his death and resurrection. The so-called “gardens of Adonis,” which were mimic representations of a tumulus planted with corn, formed a most noticeable part of the god’s ritual. They consisted of baskets or pots, filled with earth,