d in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr.
Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz and
Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, one is inclined to regard
it as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compact
statement.

Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _Primitive
Culture_, of materials bearing on different features of early
religion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficiently
thankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that we
are responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew and
survived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the
uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and
looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them,
rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture
on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire
what beings savages worship as gods. Of these we shall find that
there are several classes; and it will be necessary to notice the
great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these
classes of deities was first worshipped by man. The objects
worshipped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in
four classes, viz.--

1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small.
2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits.
3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-worship).
4. A Supreme Being.

1. Nature-worship.--It is not difficult to realise why early man
turned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him,
and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back in
civilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, the
more do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of the
sun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of early
thought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and as
guided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not fail
to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that
they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go
upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think
of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with
these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make
food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a
being who had power to put an end to a long droug