The ritual encircling dance, whether in procession with measured tread or in the form of a dance-step—and both are varieties of what is essentially the same thing—is perhaps the commonest kind of sacred dance. Its occurrence is world-wide. The object around which it takes place was in most cases, at any rate originally, a sacred one: an idol, an altar, a sacrificial victim, a holy tree, or a well. The encirclement was also performed round other things; but in these cases the dance is of another type to which attention will be drawn later. Of sacred trees[133] and wells[134] among the Israelites we have abundant witness in the Old Testament; there is also plenty of evidence of their existence among other Semitic peoples, see, for example, Baudissin, _Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte_, II. 154 ff. (1876); Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_, Lecture V. (1894); Lagrange, _Études sur les religions sémitiques_, pp. 158 ff., 162 ff. (1903), to mention but three of the foremost authorities. The Old Testament nowhere mentions any details of the cult in connexion with these sacred objects, for reasons which have been pointed out[135], and therefore there is no allusion to the dance around them; but as we know from so many sources that wherever sacred trees and springs existed (which has been all the world over) part of the ritual in connexion with them consisted of the sacred dance, we need not gather from the silence of the Old Testament that it did not take place. An interesting instance may be given of the way in which we are able to supplement an Old Testament record from other sources. In Num. xxi. 17, 18, occurs this song to the well: Spring up, O well. Sing ye unto it; To the well which the princes digged, Which the nobles of the people delved, With the wand, and with their staves. Here we have a song to the well, though no mention is made of the sacred dance; but in a striking parallel, recorded by Nilus, we are told that when the nomadic Arabs found a well they danced by it and sang songs to it[136]. Both song and dance were sacred, for, as Robertson Smith says: Of all inanimate things that which has the best marked supernatural associations among the Semites is flowing (or, as the Hebrews say, “living”) water ... and sacred wells are among the oldest and most ineradicable objects of reverence among all the Semites, and are credited with oracular powers and a sort of volition by which they receive or reject offerings. Of course these superstitions often take the form of a belief that the sacred spring is the dwelling-place of beings which from time to time emerge from it in human or animal form, but the fundamental idea is that the water itself is the living organism of a demoniac life, not a mere dead organ[137].