observation of religious ceremonies and purporting to explain them. Now, the standing explanation which myth gives of ritual is that the ritual in question is a periodic commemoration of some remarkable transaction in the past, the actors in which may have been either gods or men. Such an explanation the Balder myth would seem to offer of the annual fire-festivals which, as we saw, must have played so prominent a part in the primitive religion of the Aryan race in Europe. Balder must have been the Norse representative of the being who was burnt in effigy or in the person of a living man at the fire-festivals in question. But if, as I have tried to show, the being so burnt was the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation, it follows that Balder also must have been a tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. But it is desirable to determine, if we can, the particular kind of tree or trees, of which a personal representative was burned at the fire-festivals. For we may be quite sure that it was not as a representative of vegetation in general that the victim suffered death. The conception of vegetation in general is too abstract to be primitive. Most probably the victim at first represented a particular kind of sacred tree. Now of all European trees none has such claims as the oak to be considered as pre-eminently the sacred tree of the Aryans. Its worship is attested for all the great branches of the Aryan stock in Europe. We have seen that it was not only the sacred tree, but the principal object of worship of both Celts and Slavs.(784) According to Grimm, the oak ranked first among the holy trees of the Germans, and was indeed their chief god. It is certainly known to have been adored by them in the age of heathendom, and traces of its worship have survived in various parts of Germany almost to the present day.(785) Amongst the ancient Italians, according to Preller, the oak was sacred above all other trees.(786) The image of Jupiter on the Capitol at Rome seems to have been originally nothing but a natural oak-tree.(787) At Dodona, perhaps the oldest of all Greek sanctuaries, Zeus was worshipped as immanent in the sacred oak, and the rustling of its leaves in the wind was his voice.(788) If, then, the great god of both Greeks and Romans was represented in some of his oldest shrines under the form of an oak, and if the oak was the principal object of worship of Celts, Germans, and Slavs, we may certainly conclude that this tree was one of the chief, if not the very chief divinity of the Aryans before the dispersion; and that their primitive home must have lain in a land which was clothed with forests of oak.(789)