r, some men have been
erroneously supposed to become gods. The Euhemerist theory mainly
appeals to ancestor worship--a fact of undoubted importance in the
history of religion, especially in China and in ancient Rome. In India,
too, a dead person treated with funeral honours becomes a guardian
spirit--if neglected, a tormenting demon. But whether the great gods of
polytheism were really transfigured ancestors is very doubtful. (b)
Again, there is a tendency to offer something like worship to the
founders of religions. Thus more than human honour is paid to Zoroaster
and Buddha and even to the founders of systems not strictly religious,
e.g. to Confucius and Auguste Comte. It is noticeable that this kind of
worship is not accorded in rigidly monotheistic systems, e.g. to Moses
and Mahomet. Nor is it accurate to speak of apotheosis in cases where
the founder is in his lifetime regarded as the incarnation of a god (cf.
Ali among Shi'ite Mahommedans; the Bab in Babism; the Druse Hakim). Most
Christians on this ground repudiate the application of the term to the
worship of Jesus Christ. Curiously, _Apotheosis_ is used by the Latin
Christian poet, Prudentius (c. 400), as the title of a poem defending
orthodox views on the person of Christ and other points of doctrine--the
affectation of a decadent age. (c) The worship paid to Saints, in those
Christian churches which admit it, is formally distinguished as _dulia_
([Greek: douleia]) from true worship or _latria_ ([Greek: latreia]).
Even the Virgin Mary, though she is styled Mother of God and Queen of
Heaven, receives only _dulia_ or at most _hyperdulia_.
(R. G.; R. Ma.)

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS, the general name given to a vast system of
elevations in North America, partly in Canada, but mostly in the United
States, extending as a zone, from 100 to 300 m. wide, from Newfoundland,
Gaspe Peninsula and New Brunswick, 1500 m. south-westward to central
Alabama. The whole system may be divided into three great sections: the
_Northern_, from Newfoundland to the Hudson river; the _Central_, from
the Hudson Valley to that of New river (Great Kanawha), in Virginia and
West Virginia; and the _Southern_, from New river onwards. The northern
section includes the Shickshock Mountains and Notre Dame Range in
Quebec, scattered elevations in Maine, the White Mountains and the Green
Mountains; the central comprises, besides various minor groups, the
Valley Ridges between the Front of th