Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the penates of households {099}and the patron-deities of villages”--in other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe. One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other anthropologists. But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones, resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some curious instances. “Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was, there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god--and so on.” Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. * * The whole subject is admirably worked out in The Principles of Sociology, § 159. Hence I incline {100}to believe Mr. Turner is right, and that these stones may really have been picked out and worshipped, merely for their oddity, but always, as he correctly infers, from the belief in their connexion with some god or spirit. Here is another case, also from Polynesia, where no immediate connexion with any particular grave seems definitely implied: