of Attica.(344) Probably the rite formed part of the _Proerosia_ or Festival before Ploughing, which was intended to ensure a plentiful crop.(345) Further, it appears that the priests who guided the sacred slow-paced oxen as they dragged the plough down the furrows of the Rarian Plain, were drawn from the old priestly family of Bouzygai or “Ox-yokers,” whose eponymous ancestor is said to have been the first man to yoke oxen and to plough the fields. As they performed this time-honoured ceremony, the priests uttered many quaint curses against all churls who should refuse to lend fire or water to neighbours, or to shew the way to wanderers, or who should leave a corpse unburied.(346) If we had a complete list of the execrations fulminated by the holy ploughmen on these occasions, we might find that some of them were levelled at the impious wretches who failed to keep all the rules of the Sabbath, as we may call those periods of enforced rest and seclusion which the Kayans of Borneo and other primitive agricultural peoples observe for the good of the crops.(347) (M82) Further, when we see that many primitive peoples practise what we call games but what they regard in all seriousness as solemn rites for the good of the crops, we may be the more inclined to accept the view of the ancients, who associated the Eleusinian games directly with the worship of Demeter and Persephone, the Corn Goddesses.(348) One of the contests at the Eleusinian games was in leaping,(349) and we know that even in modern Europe to this day leaping or dancing high is practised as a charm to make the crops grow tall.(350) Again, the bull-roarer was swung so as to produce a humming sound at the Greek mysteries;(351) and when we find the same simple instrument whirled by savages in New Guinea for the sake of ensuring good crops, we may reasonably conjecture that it was whirled with a like intention by the rude forefathers of the Greeks among the cornfields of Eleusis. If that were so—though the conjecture is hardly susceptible of demonstration—it would go some way to confirm the theory that the Eleusinian mysteries were in their origin nothing more than simple rustic ceremonies designed to make the farmer’s fields to wave with yellow corn. And in the practice of the Kayans, whose worship of the rice offers many analogies to the Eleusinian worship of the corn, may we not detect a hint of the origin of that rule of secrecy which always characterised the Eleusinian mysteries? May it not have been that, just as the Kayans exclude strangers from their villages while they are engaged in the celebration of religious rites, lest the presence of these intruders should frighten or annoy the shy and touchy spirits who are invoked at these times, so the old Eleusinians may have debarred foreigners from participation in their most solemn ceremonies, lest the coy goddesses of the corn should take fright or offence at the sight of strange faces and