in waves innumerable! O Earth,
All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call,
Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see
How I, a god, am wronged by gods.
_Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_.

The minor Nature-worship has to do with rivers and springs, with
trees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, and
with the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit of
mind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as like
himself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way to
suppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabited
by a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim on
him, and brought offerings to secure their friendship. The Nile and
the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to
them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every
country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the
primeval sanctity of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the
grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the grassy
knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of
sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no
animal that has not once been worshipped. A marked feature of
primitive life also is the worship of nature not in its particular
objects but in its living processes. In a multitude of curious rites,
some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recently
been explained, primitive man brought himself into relations with
nature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with it
and imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of the
benefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended in
its processes and believed able to further him.

2. Ancestor-worship.--A set of beings of a very different kind comes
next. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a number
of objects he could make gods, his domestic experience forced him to
consider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outward
world could tell him nothing. The worship of the dead, of ancestors,
is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practised
by most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise the
meaning of death. He interprets death after the analogy of dreams, in
which he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distant
regions, coming back to the body again whe