Mr. Spencer endeavours, first, to prove, by _three_ examples, that a cult for the dead exists among three tribes of savages very low in the scale of civilization and not possessed, so far as has been observed, of any other form of religion; he thereupon infers that a cult for the dead is the earliest form of worship. These examples are open to discussion, but even if they were not, it in nowise follows that all other forms of religion spring from a cult for the dead. Death is, no doubt, so frequent and brutal a fact that it early engages the attention of primitive peoples; some germ of the notion of burial may be discovered among animals. Ants have frequently been observed, after their battles, carrying off the corpses of their soldiers; but from the fact that human intelligence must necessarily have been engaged in one direction, does it follow that it can have been engaged in no other? For the manufacture of a god Mr. Spencer requires first a corpse, second the conception of a spiritual double of the corpse, third a belief that this spirit is capable of inhabiting, not only the body, that it has just quitted, but another body, an inanimate effigy, a bee, a stone, etc. What a complication! One knows Mr. Spencer’s ingenious device for explaining tree-worship; sometimes he would have us conceive trees as the resting-places of departed souls, who for some reason or other have taken a notion to inhabit them; sometimes he would have us rely on a theory of misinterpreted legend: a tribe that in former years inhabited the forest, a tribe _come from the forest_, ultimately believes itself to be descended from trees, ultimately believes that its ancestors were trees. Really, all that strikes us as particularly artificial. A tall tree is venerable in and of itself. A certain “sacred horror” is an essential attribute of a dense forest. Night and obscurity play a notable part in the genesis of religion; well, a forest is the very incarnation of eternal night with its element of the unforeseen, its terrors, the sigh of the wind in the branches like a voice, the cry of the wild beast which seems sometimes to come from the trees themselves. And what intense and silent life in and about a tree, if one but studies it closely! An animal does not observe with sufficient attention to see plants grow and the sap rise; but how astonished man must have been when first he remarked that the roots of trees make their way even into rock, that their trunks break all bonds: that they rise year by year, and are at the very beginnings of their maturity at an age when man is old! Forest vegetation is alive, but with a life so different from ours that it must naturally have filled our ancestors with surprise and reverence. Remember, too, that the sap of certain trees, when it flows from a wound, is of the colour of blood, or of the colour and almost of the taste of milk. [Sidenote: Superfluity of effort to explain zoolatry by ancestor worship.]