There is a Japanese story in which a mother is represented as hearing her dead son’s voice in the sighing of a sacred willow which grew above his grave.[180] Grimm quotes other examples.[181] In the song of Roncesvalles, a blackthorn grows above the dead Saracens, a white flower above the dead Christians. In other legends white lilies grow from the graves of persons unjustly executed. From a maiden’s grave grew three lilies which none but her lover might pluck. In all these legends we have a survival of very primitive ideas about the soul, ideas out of which subsequently arose the formal doctrine of transmigration. The immortality of the soul was accepted, but there was always an inclination to quarter it in some new living thing. The instances above given, in which it was thought to pass into some plant, especially concern us, as illustrating the primitive belief that trees and shrubs might contain a spirit in human form. A further derivative of the assumed kinship between human and vegetable life is the conception of the tree as sympathetically interwoven with the life and fortunes of an individual, a family, or a community. “In folktales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that the withering of the plant will immediately follow or be followed by the death of the person. Among the M‘Bengas in Western Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day the people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees, and if the tree dies or is thrown down they are sure that the child will soon die. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of the tree. Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born child sympathetically with that of a tree, by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree. This is supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the tree is cut down the child will die.”[182] According to the Talmud, the destruction of Bithar, in which four hundred thousand Israelites lost their lives, originated in the resentment of one of its inhabitants at the wanton destruction of a young cedar-tree, which, according to the custom of the place, he had planted at the birth of his child.[183] It was usual amongst the Romans to plant a tree at the birth of a son, and from its vigour to forecast the prosperity of the child. It is related in the life of Virgil, that the poplar planted at his birth flourished exceedingly, and far outstripped all its contemporaries. A similar superstition has persisted even into times that are almost contemporary. Lord Byron, for all his scepticism, had the idea that his life and prosperity depended on the fate of an oak which he had planted when he first visited Newstead.[184]