that man was ever without these.

Yea, I sang, as now I sing, when the Prehistoric Spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove,
And the troll, and gnome, and dwerg, and the gods of cliff and berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.[35]

The idea of animism, the belief that everything had a personality of
its own, certainly belonged to the later prehistoric period, for among
the articles which fill the graves of aboriginal peoples, for use on
the last journey, we find weapons to enable the deceased to drive off
the evil spirits which would surround his own after death. Spirits, to
early man, are always relatively smaller than himself. He beholds the
"picture of a little man" in his comrade's eyes, and concludes it to
be his 'soul.' Some primitive peoples, indeed, believe that several
parts of the body have each their own resident soul. Again, the spirit
of the corn or the spirit of the flower, the savage would argue, must
in the nature of things be small. We can thus see how the belief in
'the little folk' may have arisen, and how they remained little until
a later day.

A much more scientific theory of the origin of the belief in fairies
is that which sees in them the deities of a discredited religion, the
gods of an aboriginal people, rather than the people themselves. Such
were the Irish _Daoine Sidhe_, and the Welsh _y Mamau_ ('the
Mothers')--undoubtedly gods of the Celts. Again, although in many
countries, especially in England, the fairies are regarded as small of
stature, in Celtic countries the fay proper, as distinct from the
brownie and such goblins, is of average mortal height, and this would
seem to be the case in Brittany. Whether the gorics and courils of
Brittany, who seem sufficiently small, are fairies or otherwise is a
moot point. They seem to be more of the field spirit type, and are
perhaps classed more correctly with the gnome race; we thus deal with
them in our chapter on sprites and demons. It would seem, too, as if
there might be ground for the belief that the normal-sized fairy race
of Celtic countries had become confounded with the Teutonic idea of
elves (Teut. _Elfen_) in Germany and England, from which, perhaps,
they borrowed their diminutive size.

But these are only considerations, not conclusions. Strange as it may
seem, folk-lore has by no means solved the fairy problem, and much
remains to be accomplished ere we can write 'Finis' to the study of
fairy origin