1. This is _the last of the series of harvest festivals_, as we may call them generically. We have had the Ambarvalia and the plucking of the first ears by the Vestals in May: the Vestalia in June[1063]; the festivals of Consus and Ops Consiva in August; and lastly we find this one coming after all the fruits of the land have been gathered in. In this respect it is parallel to the Pyanepsia and Oschophoria of the Greeks, to the Jewish feast of Tabernacles[1064], and to the true Michaelmas harvest-festivals of modern Europe, which follow at an interval the great variety of quaint harvest customs which occur at the actual in-gathering. Even now in the Roman Campagna there is a lively festival of this kind in October. It should be noticed that the harvest character of the rite was suggested to Mannhardt by the passage from Paulus (220), from which we learn that the head of the sacrificed horse was decked with cakes, like those of the live draught-animals at the Vestalia and Consualia and feriae Sementivae [q. v.]. This, Paulus adds, was done ‘quia id sacrum fiebat ob frugum eventum,’ which last words can hardly mean anything but ‘on account of the _past_ harvest[1065].’ There are, I may add, two points open to doubt here, which Mannhardt does not point out: (1) the reason here given may be only a guess of Verrius’, and not one generally understood at Rome[1066]. (2) The concluding words of the gloss seem to make no sense, a fact which throws some doubt on the whole passage. The rite is ‘ob frugum eventum,’ yet ‘a horse, and not an ox, is the victim, because a horse is suited for war, and an ox is not[1067].’ However this may be understood, we need not quarrel with the conclusion[1068], that the real meaning of the adornment was to show that the head was an object possessed of power to procure fertility—an inference confirmed by the eagerness of the rival city-quarters to get possession of it. 2. The _sacrificed horse represented a Corn-spirit_. The Corn-spirit was Mannhardt’s chief discovery, and its various forms are now familiar to English readers of Frazer’s _Golden Bough_, and of Farnell’s _Cults of the Greek States_. Almost every common animal, wild or tame, may be found to represent the Corn-spirit at harvest-time in one locality or another, where the nomadic age has given place to an agricultural one; or a man, woman, boy or puppet represents the animal, and so indirectly the Corn-spirit[1069]. Mannhardt produces from his stores of folk-lore many instances in which the horse thus figures, including the hobby-horse which in old England used to prance round the May-pole. Those examples, however, are not strong enough to convince us that the October horse was a Corn-spirit, though they prove well enough that the Corn-spirit often took this shape[1070]. But we must remember that he is only suggesting an _origin_ in the simple rites of the farm, indicating a class of ideas to which this survival may be traceable[1071].