, and on which the Congo negro
takes his oath--has lost its significance.

The Red Indian of North America had his Rattle man, who, as physician,
used it as a universal prescription in the cure of all disease,
believing, no doubt, that its jargon would allay pain, in like manner as
it attracts and soothes a cross child; and this modern type of primitive
man, the Red Indian, although fast dying out, has no obscured visions of
the records of childhood; they have remained since his _anno mundi_ ran
back to zero. To him the great sources of religious and moral suasion
which gave birth to mediaeval and modern Europe, and so largely
contributed to the polity of Asia and the upraising of Africa, have been
a dead letter, which spell his extinction. He lived up to his racial
traditions, and is fast dying with them. His language, his arts, his
religious rites are of an unfamiliar past.

Leaving the Red Indian moon worshipper with his death rattle awhile and
harking back to Europe, Norway stands out as the richest country in
legendary lore, for old-time superstitions have lingered among the
simple and credulous people, living pent up on the horrid crags, where
torrents leap from cliff to valley. Their tales of goblins and spirits,
tales of trolls, gnomes, and a legendary host of other uncanny
creatures, point to the former nature and ancestral worship of a people
cut off from the advancing civilisation of their time. Luckily for the
archaeologist, superstitious beliefs and folk-lore tales have preserved
the graves of the Stone Age inhabitants of the country from desecration.
As in Norway so in the Isle of Man, and in the western districts of
Ireland.

In Man until the fifties many of the inhabitants believed in the Spirit
of the Mountains; indeed, even in County Donegal and the West Riding of
Yorkshire, up to the last twenty years, fairy superstition was rife.
Boyd Dawkins gives in his chapter, "Superstition of the Stone Age: Early
Man in Britain," an account of an Isle of Man farmer who, having allowed
investigation to be made in the interests of science on portions of his
lands, becoming so awed at the thought of having sanctioned the
disturbing of the dead, that he actually offered up a heifer as a burnt
sacrifice to avert the wrath of the Manes. After lunar and solar
worships this ancestral worship of the Isle of Man farmer ranks next in
point of age, a survival of which is seen in the respect paid by country
people to the