bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson
(2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable
of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but
when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with
mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated
in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit,
but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant
and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual
relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse (3) (also the
Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced.
The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and
still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee
Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes
by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.

(1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
1896.

(2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.

(3) "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
Hist. Religion, p. 119).

And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception,
which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their
tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought
them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees,
the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set
in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like
noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground,
you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons
it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to
leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow
tall." (1) Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly
yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green
boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an
encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic
Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself
you natura