These four points, taken together, i. e. the multiplicity of the Fauni, their woodland character, and their supposed powers of productivity and prophecy, seem by no means to exclude the possibility of the human origin suggested long ago by Scaliger, and recently by Prof. Nettleship, though I would shape the explanation somewhat differently. Wild men from the hills and woods, for example, might well be supposed to be possessed of supernatural powers, like the gipsies of modern times[1150]. And the striking absence of any epigraphical survivals of a definite cult may possibly be explained by a persistence of the belief in the Italian mind that Faunus was never really and truly a god, but one of a race with some superhuman attributes—a link in the chain that always in antiquity connected together the human and the divine. Horace’s ode shows the divine element predominating; some local Faunus has, so to speak, been caught and half deified; and yet, even then, the process is hardly complete. There is, however, another explanation of conceptions of this kind to which I must briefly allude, which was based by Dr. Mannhardt on an exhaustive examination of the attributes of creatures like the Fauni, as they occur in various parts of Europe and elsewhere[1151]. The general result of his investigation may be stated thus. Spirits which seem to have their origin in woods and mountains find outward expression for their being in the _wind_; so also do those which seem to have their origin in corn and vegetation generally. We thus find three ingredients in their composition: (1) trees, (2) corn, (3) wind. We have only to think how the invisible wind moves the branches of the trees, or bows the corn before it, to see how closely, in the eyes of men used to attribute life to inanimate things, the idea of the wind might run together with that of objects to which it seems to give motion and life. The result of its mysterious agency is the growth of a variety of creatures of the imagination, often half bestial, like Pan and the Russian Ljeschi, sometimes entirely animal, like the Rye-wolf and many another animal corn-spirit now familiar to readers of Frazer’s _Golden Bough_; sometimes entirely human, like Silvanus, perhaps Faunus himself[1152], or the Teutonic ‘wild man of the woods.’ Mannhardt endeavours, not wholly without success, to bring the attributes of Faunus into harmony with this theory. His prophetic _vox_ comes from the forest in which the wind raises strange noises; his relation to crops and flocks is parallel to that of many other spirits who can be traced to a woodland origin; and the word Favonius, used for the western moist and fertilizing breeze, is kindred, if not identical, with Faunus; and so on.