We get two stages of this evolution side by side in the two deities of the Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, “one with a stone head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood.” In the Indian groups of standing stones, representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a usual practice,” {110}says Dr. Tylor, “to daub each stone with red paint, forming, as it were, a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped idol.” Mr. Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this practice in an instructive passage. “A Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a stone for succour paints it with some red pigment, such as red ochre. Now, when we read that along with offerings of milk, honey, fruit, flour, etc., the Bodo and Dhimals offer ‘red lead or cochineal,’ we may suspect that these three colouring matters, having red as their common character, are substitutes for blood. The supposed resident ghost was at first propitiated by anointing the stone with human blood; and then, in default of this, red pigment was used, ghosts and gods being supposed by primitive men to be easily deceived by shams.” It is possible, too, that with the process of idealisation and spiritualisation it might be supposed a substitute would please the gods equally well, or that redness generally was the equivalent of blood, in the same way as the Chinese burn paper money and utensils to set free their ghosts for the use of ancestral spirits. In any case, it is interesting to note that the faces of many Hindu gods are habitually painted red. And that this is the survival of the same ancient custom we see in the case of Shashti, protectress of children, whose proper representative is “a rough stone as big as a man’s head, smeared with red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece down to the classical period. “The faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,” says Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.” In early South Italy, too, the Priapus-Hermes, who protected the fields, had his face similarly “daubed with minium.” Is it possible to dissever these facts from the cannibal banquets of the Aztec gods, where the images had lumps of palpitating human flesh thrust into their lips, {111}and where their faces were smeared with the warm blood of the helpless victims? Only in one instance, however, have I been able to trace the custom of painting with red directly back to cannibalism, and that is among the man-eaters of the New Hebrides, where, when a man died, and his body was laid out in a piece of thick native cloth, “the face was kept exposed and painted red.” I believe with this practice must ultimately be correlated the red-painted faces of the Corinthian Dionysi.