nary personalities. And so
it will happen that, as Mr. McLennan says of the Feejeeans, "Vegetables
and stones, nay, even tools and weapons, pots and canoes, have souls
that are immortal, and that, like the souls of men, pass on at last to
Mbulu, the abode of departed spirits." Setting out, then, with a belief
in the still-living other self of the dead ancestor, the alleged general
cause of misapprehension affords us an intelligible origin of the
fetichistic conception; and we are enabled to see how it tends to become
a general, if not a universal, conception.

* * * * *

Other apparently inexplicable phenomena are at the same time divested of
their strangeness. I refer to the beliefs in, and worship of, compound
monsters--impossible hybrid animals, and forms that are half human, half
brutal. The theory of a primordial Fetichism, supposing it otherwise
adequate, yields no feasible solutions of these. Grant the alleged
original tendency to think of all natural agencies as in some way
personal. Grant, too, that hence may arise a worship of animals, plants,
and even inanimate bodies. Still the obvious implication is that the
worship so derived will be limited to things that are, or have been,
perceived. Why should this mode of thought lead the savage to imagine a
combination of bird and mammal; and not only to imagine it, but to
worship it as a god? If even we admit that some illusion may have
suggested the belief in a creature half man, half fish, we cannot thus
explain the prevalence among Eastern races of idols representing
bird-headed men, and men having their legs replaced by the legs of a
cock, and men with the heads of elephants.

Carrying with us the inferences above drawn, however, it is a corollary
that ideas and practices of these kinds will arise. When tradition
preserves both lines of ancestry--when a chief, nicknamed "the Wolf",
carries away from an adjacent tribe a wife who is remembered either
under the animal name of her tribe, or as a woman; it will happen that
if a son distinguishes himself, the remembrance of him among his
descendants will be that he was born of a wolf and some other animal, or
of a wolf and a woman. Misinterpretation, arising in the way described
from defects of language, will entail belief in a creature uniting the
attributes of the two; and if the tribe grows into a society,
representations of such a creature will become objects of worship. One
of the