Where many sacred stones exist all round, marking the graves of the dead, or inhabited by their spirits, it is not surprising, once more, that a general feeling of reverence towards all stones should begin to arise--that the stone per se, especially if large, odd, or conspicuous, should be credited to some extent with indwelling divinity. Nor is it astonishing that the idea of men being descended from stones should be rife among people who must often, when young, have been shown headstones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs, and been told that the offerings made upon them were gifts to their ancestors. They would accept the idea as readily as our own children accept the Hebrew myth of the creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from “the dust of the ground”--a far less promising material than a block of marble or sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we can most readily understand the numerous stories of men becoming stones, and stones becoming men, which are rife among the myths of savage or barbarous peoples. Fernandez de Piedrahita says that the Laches “worshipped every stone as a god, as they said they had all been men.” Arriaga tells us the Peruvians paid honour to “very large stones, saying that they were once men.” In the American _Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1880_, several stories are told of metamorphosis of men into stones from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the Oneidas and Dakotahs claim descent from stones, to which they ascribe animation. An interesting intermediate form, which shows the growth of this idea, is given in Arriaga’s statement that the Marcayoc, or idol worshipped in {107}Peru as the patron of the village, “is sometimes a stone and sometimes a mummy”: in other words, it depended upon circumstances whether they reverenced the body itself or the gravestone that covered it. Among the Coast Negroes, when a person dies, a stone is taken to a certain house--the village valhalla--to represent his ghost; and among the Bulloms, women “make occasional sacrifices and offerings of rice to the stones which are preserved in memory of the dead.” At Tanna, in the New Hebrides, Mr. Gray, a missionary, found “a piece of sacred ground, on which were deposited the stones in which they supposed the spirits of their departed relatives to reside”; and Commander Henderson, commenting upon a similar case from Vati Island, says these “were the only form of gods the natives possessed, and into them they supposed the souls of their departed friends and relatives to enter.” Some of them “had a small piece chipped out on one side, by means of which the indwelling ghost or spirit was supposed to have ingress or egress.” Of a third sort, rudely fashioned by hand, Captain Henderson says acutely, “these, it seemed to me, were the beginnings of a graven image--a common stone, sacred as the dwelling-place of an ancestral ghost.” *