Now, as has already been said, the scheme of life of the crops and flocks is, at least in the main, and particularly in so far as it vitally and always interests their keepers, a scheme of fecundity, fertility and growth. But these matters, visibly and by conscious sentiment, pertain in a peculiarly intimate sense to the women. They are matters in which the sympathetic insight and fellow-feeling of womankind should in the nature of things come very felicitously to further the propitious course of things. Besides which the life of the women falls in these same lines of fecundity, nurture and growth, so that their association and attendance on the flocks and crops should further the propitious course of things also by the subtler means of sympathetic suggestion. There is a magical congruity of great force as between womankind and the propagation of growing things. And these subtler ways of influencing events are especially to the point in all contact with these non-human sentient beings, since they are speechless and must therefore in the main be led by living example rather than by precept and expostulation. And, again, being sentient, somewhat after the fashion of mankind, it is not to be believed that they have not the gift visibly common to mankind and many animals, of following their leader by force of sympathetic imitation. It may not be easy to say how far this instinctive impulse of imitation, necessarily credited to all phenomena to which anthropomorphic traits are imputed, is to be accounted the ground of all sympathetic magic; but it is at least to be accepted as sufficient to account for much of what is done to induce fertility in flocks and crops.