belongs to a very early stage of human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with the anthropomorphic gods who have been developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. The principle here laid down is only in part applicable to the case under consideration; but it suggests that the dog, which was clearly sacred to the Dakotahs, was not eaten solely on account of its qualities of sagacity and bravery; these happened to be its characteristics which were absorbed by eating it. As a sacred animal it possessed supernatural powers, exemplified especially by its characteristic qualities. In a different stage of the development of this general conception a sacred animal would be partaken of, divine power being thereby acquired, irrespective of any quality that it might possess[295]. “Holy animals,” says Robertson Smith, “and holy things generally, are primarily conceived, not as belonging to the deity, but as being themselves instinct with divine power or life. Thus a holy animal is one which has a divine life; and if it be holy to a particular god, the meaning must be that its life and his are somehow bound up together. From what is known of primitive ways of thought we may infer that this means that the sacred animal is akin to the god, for all valid and permanent relation between individuals is conceived as kinship[296].” In a still later stage of development, with an advanced conception of deity, a sacrifice to the god would be regarded as the means of securing what was desired, _e.g._ in the present case, divine aid to victory, as we find in 1 Sam. xiii. 9, 10. So that it is conceivable that in an earlier stage the Semitic forbears of the Israelites partook of a sacrifice preparatory to battle in the belief that by this means the strength of the god would be imparted to them.