In fine, no one who has not studied the subject can have any idea of the sanctity associated with the tree amongst pre-Christian nations. The general conclusion which Bötticher gives as the result of his elaborate research, is that the worship of the tree was not only the earliest form of divine ritual, but was the last to disappear before the spread of Christianity; it existed long before the erection of temples and statues to the gods, flourished side by side with them, and persisted long after they had disappeared.[48] Mr. Tylor, with greater caution, concludes that _direct and absolute tree-worship_ may lie very wide and deep in the early history of religion, but that apart from this “there is a wide range of animistic conceptions connected with tree and forest worship. The tree may be the spirit’s perch, or shelter, or favourite haunt; or may serve as a scaffold or altar, where offerings can be set out for some spiritual being; or its shelter may be a place of worship set apart by nature, of some tribes the only temple, of many tribes, perhaps, the earliest; or lastly, it may be merely a sacred object patronised by, or associated with, or symbolising some divinity.”[49] These varied conceptions, Mr. Tylor thinks, conform, in spite of their confusion, to the animistic theology in which they all have their essential principles. To discuss the origin of tree-worship would involve the consideration of the whole question of primitive culture, the theory of animism, and the subject of ancestor worship, together with a digression on the very obscure problem of totemism. The last word has not yet been said on these questions, and the time has certainly not yet come to say it. As will be shown in the next two chapters, the general conception of the tree-spirit includes at least two different series of ideas, that on the one hand of the tree-god, whose worship became organised into a definite religion, and on the other hand that of the tree-demons or tree-spirits, whose propitiation was degraded into or never rose above the level of sorcery and incantation. To define the relation between these two conceptions is extremely difficult, and it has been approached by different writers along two different lines of thought. Either the gods were developed from the spiritual forces assumed by primitive man to be inherent in nature, and gradually differentiated from the less friendly powers embodied in the various demons, until they came to be regarded as the kinsmen and parents of their worshippers; or they were ancestral spirits, at once feared and trusted from their very origin by their kinsmen, whilst all the class of minor spirits and demons were but degenerate gods or the ancestral spirits of enemies. The former view is put forward by Professor Robertson Smith, in a chapter that deserves most careful study, but he admits that it is difficult to understand how the friendly powers of nature that haunted a district in which men lived