and prospered, and were regarded as embodied in holy trees and springs, became identified with the tribal god of a community and the parent of a race.[50] There is no such difficulty in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory that all religion arose from ancestor worship, or in Mr. Grant Allen’s supplementary contention that trees and stones came to be regarded as sacred and to be honoured with sacrifices because they were originally associated with the ancestral grave, and were hence assumed to have become the haunts or embodiments of the ancestral spirit.[51] This latter view, however, does not seem to take sufficient account of the thousand spirits who, in the belief of primitive men, thronged the woods, the mountains, and the springs, and appeared in horrible animal or semi-human form. Probably the truth lies between the two theories, and the primitive worship of the tree had more than one root. CHAPTER II THE GOD AND THE TREE When we examine more closely the spiritual beings who have been thought to haunt or inhabit vegetation, we find that they fall more or less distinctly into two classes—into tree-gods on the one hand, and on the other into the various tree-demons, wood-spirits, dryads, elves, jinns, and fabulous monsters common to the mythology of all countries. There is, perhaps, no absolutely definite line of demarcation between the two classes, for primitive thought does not deal in sharp definitions. But the division, besides being convenient for our present purpose, is a vital one. For a god is an individual spirit who enters into stated relations with man, is mostly if not invariably regarded as akin to his worshippers, and is presumably their friend, ally, and protector. Whereas the demon is an independent and, as a rule, not individualised spirit, without human kinship, and for the most part unfriendly to man. The god is to be revered, approached and called upon by name; the demon, as a rule, to be dreaded and shunned. The present chapter will be devoted to the belief in the tree-inhabiting god.