TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the _coco de mer_ which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back far into times when history was not. Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were domesticated; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed (which one may see by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees, the others. This classification was worthy of the most far-seeing mind of antiquity. Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined in sacred books; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the world. Man was home-sick of innocence; his conscience, which has gone on getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the “daily murder.” So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for slaughter. The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four animals were made: the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none left. God said: “If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to eat you?” Fearing starvation, the animals consented.