“Chardin, in his account of the stone circles he saw in Persia, mentions a tradition that they were used as places of assembly, each member of the council being seated on a stone; Homer, in his description of the shield of Achilles in the _Iliad_, speaks of the elders sitting in the place of justice upon stones in a circle; Plot, in his account of the Rollrich stones in Oxfordshire, says that Olaus Wormius, Saxo Grammaticus, Meursius, and many other early historians, concur in stating that it was the practice of the ancient Danes to elect their kings in stone circles, each member of the council being seated upon a stone; the tradition arising out of this custom, that these stones represent petrified giants, is widely spread in all countries where they occur, and Col. Forbes Leslie has shown that within the historic period, these circles were used in Scotland as places of justice” (Lane Fox, (=20=), p. 64). Is not our king crowned seated upon the Lia-fail, which is now in the coronation chair at Westminster? Such customs and beliefs are widespread also in India, Indonesia, and beyond, as W. J. Perry has pointed out. The practices still observed in the Khasia Hills in modern times clearly indicate the significance of this use of stone seats; and the custom can be found from the Canary Islands in the West (=26=) to Costa Rica in the East, encircling the whole globe (compare “_Man_,” May, 1915, p. 79). I shall enter more fully into the consideration of the origin of the ideas associated with stone seats when Perry has published his important analysis of the significance of so curious a practice. The converse of the belief in the bringing to life of stone statues—or perhaps it would be more correct to say, the complementary view that, if a stone can be converted into a living creature, the latter can also be transformed into stone—is found also wherever the parent belief is known to exist. As a rule it forms part of a complexly interwoven series of traditions concerning the creation, the deluge, the destruction of the “sons of men” by petrifaction, and the repeopling the earth by the incestuous intercourse of the “children of the gods.” Perry, who has made a study of the geographical distribution and associations of these curiously-linked traditions, has clearly demonstrated that they form an integral part of the cultural equipment of the sun-worshipping, stone-using peoples. In the foregoing statement I have endeavoured to indicate also their genetic connection with the ideas that sprang from the early practice of mummification in Egypt.