indeed it is recognized at all. The savage attributes to animals the
same ideas, the same mental processes as himself, and at the same time
vastly greater power and cunning. The dead animal is credited with a
knowledge of how its remains are treated and sometimes with a power of
taking vengeance on the fortunate hunter. Powers of reasoning are not
denied to animals nor even speech; the silence of the brute creation
may be put down to their superior cunning. We may assume that man
attributed a soul to the beasts of the field almost as soon as he
claimed one for himself. It is therefore not surprising to find that
many peoples on the lower planes of culture respect and even worship
animals (see TOTEM; ANIMAL WORSHIP); though we need not attribute
an animistic origin to all the developments, it is clear that the
widespread respect paid to animals as the abode of dead ancestors, and
much of the cult of dangerous animals, is traceable to this principle.
With the rise of species, deities and the cult of individual animals,
the path towards anthropomorphization and polytheism is opened and the
respect paid to animals tends to lose its strict animistic character.

_Plant Souls._--Just as human souls are assigned to animals, so
primitive man often credits trees and plants with souls in both human
or animal form. All over the world agricultural peoples practise
elaborate ceremonies explicable, as Mannhardt has shown, on animistic
principles. In Europe the corn spirit sometimes immanent in the crop,
sometimes a presiding deity whose life does not depend on that of the
growing corn, is conceived in some districts in the form of an ox,
hare or cock, in others as an old man or woman; in the East Indies
and America the rice or maize mother is a corresponding figure; in
classical Europe and the East we have in Ceres and Demeter, Adonis
and Dionysus, and other deities, vegetation gods whose origin we can
readily trace back to the rustic corn spirit. Forest trees, no less
than cereals, have their indwelling spirits; the fauns and satyrs
of classical literature were goat-footed and the tree spirit of the
Russian peasantry takes the form of a goat; in Bengal and the East
Indies wood-cutters endeavour to propitiate the spirit of the tree
which they cut down; and in many parts of the world trees are
regarded as the abode of the spirits of the dead. Just as a process of
syncretism has given rise to cults of animal gods, tree spirits tend
t