* I owe this and several other references to Mr. Spencer’s Appendix, as I do some of my previously cited cases to Mr. Lang or Dr. Tylor. Classical and Hebrew literature are full of examples of such stones, believed to have been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife are instances that will at once occur to every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells us, people believed Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, was changed into a stone. Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another example, paralleled by the Breton idea that their great stone circles were people, who, in the modern Christianised version of the story, were turned into stone for dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word to say further on; meanwhile, observe the similar name of the Giant’s Dance given to the great Stonehenge {108}of Ireland.) In the same way there is a Standing Rock on the upper Missouri which parallels the story of Niobe--it was once a woman, who became petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or ancestral ghosts) “were changed into stones,” says Mr. Turner, “and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.” On the other hand, if men become stones, stones also become men, or at least give birth to men. We get a good instance of this in the legend of Deucalion. Again, by the roadside, near the city of the Panopoeans, lay the stones out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man in Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. The inhabitants of the New Hebrides say that “the human race sprang from stones and the earth.” On Francis Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the temple there was a seven-feet-long beach sandstone slab erected, before which offerings were laid as the people united for prayer”; and the natives here told him that one of their gods had made stones become men. “In Melanesia,” says Mr. Lang, “matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the spirit’s outward part or organ.” And, indeed, a sort of general confusion between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor, and the god, at last pervades the mind of the stone-worshipper everywhere. “The curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children,” as Dr. Tylor calls it--an idea familiar to the Fijians as to the Peruvians and Lapps--is surely explicable at once by the existence of headstones either to men or women, and the confusion between the mark and the ghost it commemorates.