the conception of
a name, with its answering abstract term, must be long current before
the verb to name can arise. Hence, men with speech so rude, cannot
transmit the tradition of an ancestor named "the Wolf", as distinguished
from the actual wolf. The children and grandchildren who saw him will
not be led into error; but in later generations, descent from "the Wolf"
will inevitably come to mean descent from the animal known by that name.
And the ideas and sentiments which, as above shown, naturally grow up
round the belief that the dead parents and grandparents are still alive,
and ready, if propitiated, to befriend their descendants, will be
extended to the wolf species.

Before passing to other developments of this general view, let me point
out how not simply animal-worship is thus accounted for, but also the
conception, so variously illustrated in ancient legends, that animals
are capable of displaying human powers of speech and thought and action.
Mythologies are full of stories of beasts and birds and fishes that have
played intelligent parts in human affairs--creatures that have
befriended particular persons by giving them information, by guiding
them, by yielding them help; or else that have deceived them, verbally
or otherwise. Evidently all these traditions, as well as those about
abductions of women by animals and fostering of children by them, fall
naturally into their places as results of the habitual misinterpretation
I have described.

* * * * *

The probability of the hypothesis will appear still greater when we
observe how readily it applies to the worship of other orders of
objects. Belief in actual descent from an animal, strange as we may
think it, is one by no means incongruous with the unanalyzed experiences
of the savage; for there come under his notice many metamorphoses,
vegetal and animal, which are apparently of like character. But how
could he possibly arrive at so grotesque a conception as that the
progenitor of his tribe was the sun, or the moon, or a particular star?
No observation of surrounding phenomena affords the slightest suggestion
of any such possibility. But by the inheritance of nicknames that are
eventually mistaken for the names of the objects from which they were
derived, the belief readily arises--is sure to arise. That the names of
heavenly bodies will furnish metaphorical names to the uncivilized, is
manifest. Do we not ourselves call a