ll descended from Abraham, the Edomites from
Esau, etc. That is the necessary condition of brotherhood in early
times; only those could join in a religious rite who were of the same
blood. For men of another blood there was another worship, another
god. It is an earlier stage of this view, when men are of the same
worship because they are descended from the same animal, and when
they worship that animal.

[Footnote 1: J. G. Frazer, "Totemism," in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, vol. xxiii., and now his _Totemism and Exogamy_. It was
formerly held that the Semites were an exception, having never passed
through the totemistic stage. Mr. Robertson Smith, in his _Religion
of the Semites_, maintains that, though they are past that stage when
we first know them, the traces of it are apparent in their
institutions, and that their sacrifices especially are based on ideas
belonging to it. Wellhausen does not agree with him in this.]

[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, 1869-70. See also Mr. Lang's
_Myth, Ritual and Religion_ in many passages.]

(_b_) Trees, Wells, Stones.--The worship of each of these three is in
itself a great subject, and we can do no more than mention the
leading views which appear to have entered into them. Mannhardt in
his _Feld- und Waldkulte_ and Frazer in _The Golden Bough_ have
studied the survivals of tree-worship in the local customs of the
peasantry of Europe. Early man appears to have worshipped trees as
wonderful living beings; but his thought soon advanced to the
conception of a tree-spirit, of which the tree itself was either the
body or the dwelling, and which possessed various powers, such as
that of commanding rain, or that of causing fertility in plants or in
animals. From the tree-spirit, again, the tree-god was further
formed, a being who was able to quit the sacred tree or who presided
over many trees. Of these beliefs the fast-decaying usages of the
Maypole and the Harvest May still remind us.

The well, in a similar manner, may first have been worshipped in and
for itself, and then a nymph may have been added to it. The worship
of wells consisted in throwing precious articles into them, or
hanging such offerings on the surrounding trees, and asking some boon
from the deity.[3] Rivers and lakes were also held sacred. The
worship of stones, that is of stones not treated by art, but regarded
as sacred in the form in which they were found, was widely diffused
among early races; but this