to explain it as a deduction from a single special class of experiences, and that the variety of things in which it was supposed by primitive men, to consist showed that no one of these by itself exhaustively represented the idea of the soul which they were supposed to embody; so here it will be found impossible to trace the pedigree of all the many forms of polytheistic worship out of a single line of descent. Mr. Spencer's endeavour to do so, though certainly full of ability, is open to manifold objections. He explains fetichism, for example, which is very widespread, as the result of a funeral custom which is very rare, the practice of constructing memorial images of the dead and making offerings to them. Then his theory of the origin of the worship of animals and natural objects, though resembling, as I have said, in a certain measure the theory of the mythologists, is attended with a fatal objection which does not apply to theirs. For, on the assumption involved in their hypothesis, the process of naming which eventually creates the confusion is one which has taken place in the remotest age, and is not again repeated; whereas, on the assumption involved in his, the confusion takes place in the teeth of the continuous fresh application of the class of names in question. It is not distant ancestors alone who are called by the names of animals and hills and heavenly bodies, but living men and women are still, and have always been, so named among the lower races, and if they never made the confusion he speaks of in the latter case, it is difficult to see how they should make it in the former. If such a practice

were extinct, it might be misunderstood in the way supposed, but if people were still in the habit of calling their kindred lion or sun, and yet never thought of identifying them with the objects they were called after, it is extremely improbable that they should do so in the case of their ancestors. The natural inference they would make would be that their ancestors got their names exactly as their living friends did, and their present consciousness of the reasons that guided themselves in the giving of such names would effectually check any tendency to the kind of confusion Mr. Spencer postulates. But his theory is liable to another important objection, and that is that it gives us a different version of ancestor worship from what he wants, for in early society, when the confusion in question is supposed to have taken place, men belonged to the tribe of their mothers, and accordingly, if Mr. Spencer's theory is true, every tribe, instead of worshipping its own ancestors, worshipped those of its neighbours. Then, again, if the whole force of the religious sentiment came from filial interest, that sentiment would fade away, just as funeral rites are discontinued when the mcmory of the departed becomes less vivid; whereas, by Mr. Spencer's theory, the actual fact is the reverse of this, and religious veneration increases the more, the more the original character of its object is forgotten and the feeling that first awoke it has decayed. An ancestor becomes more of a god as he becomes less of an ancestor, which would be a very anomalous result if the only reason why he is a god at all

is because he is an ancestor, and if the one root of all religion was ancestor worship. But if, on the other hand, the religious sentiment is sustained from other sources besides filial feelings, then what are they?

An entirely different genesis of religious ideas and systems from Mr. Spencer's, is that which is given us by Caspari in his "Urgeschichte der Menschheit," and which is accepted by Baer, Hellwald, and others. He starts from the assumption of an animal period of humanity which lasted much longer than we suppose, and was much liker the condition of the beasts than we realize. In this period man had as yet not only no dream of a distinction between soul and body, but none of a distinction between living and lifeless. He had no general ideas and no power of making them, and his interests were confined entirely to a small group of things in his immediate vicinity, and especially to such as impinged in any way on his limited wants. The stars and the lightning, for instance, were matters of the utmost indifference to him, as they are to some of the lower animals. Religion is a slow growth, issuing out of the filial and social sentiments, which man shares with many of the brutes; especially out of the combined love and fear with which we and they alike naturally regard our social superiors. The first positive object of worship was the tribal chief, the tribal father, the "first man," who was regarded with a higher reverence, and received a wider obedience, than any other head of a family in the tribe. After his death, this feeling of reverence was transferred to his corpse, not to his spirit, for that idea had not yet arisen, and the corpse was thought to be merely sunk in a longer sleep, was laid in a grave to protect it from the beasts till it awoke, and was regularly supplied with food which it might use on awaking. So far Caspari takes very much the same road as Mr. Spencer, except that he denies to man in this stage the possession of a distinction between soul and body, and maintains accordingly that man's religion was at this time only corpse worship, which, however, was accompanied by animal worship, because the animals which ate the corpse were supposed to have incorporated the dead man somehow or other into their own being, and therefore naturally received the worship which was the recognized due of the man they ate. The animals which were worshipped at this early period were exclusively the carnivorous, we might say the hominivorous animals, though other reasons subsequently gave rise from time to time to the worship of other kinds of animals also. He says cannibalism was also a characteristic of this period, and that it arose from the same belief that the substance of the man eaten went into the eater, but he does not explain why this did not lead to a worship of the hominivorous man, as it ought to have done if the principle by which he explained animal worship is correct.

Such was the religion of man in the long period known as the Stone Age, but at length in the course of centuries of work at the making of stone and wooden implements, one of the cripples who were the workmen

of the period, because they were unfit for war, stumbled accidentally upon the invention of fire, and that invention constituted, perhaps, the most creative epoch that has ever occurred in the whole history of mankind. In fact it made man. Before, he was only one of the animals, but now he steps out all at once a being of intellect, of many-sided power and interests, of immense and rapid progressiveness. It was fire that gave him his start, both mental and material, and fire, therefore, naturally long coloured all his thoughts. It had most important effects on his religious development.

It gave him, first of all, his idea of spirit or soul. Men began to think of everything under the analogy of the discovery of which their thoughts were so full. It was the analogy of fire residing as a secret principle in the wood out of which it was produced by friction, and the analogy of the smoke ascending out of the flame, that first suggested to men the idea that there was within the body a separate principle called the soul. The soul was the secret fire of the body, and it passed up from it at death like smoke from the flame. Caspari goes even so far as to say, that they thought the black smoke which rose to heaven became the white clouds that rested there, and that this conception of the white. clouds is the source of the white clothing in which spirits and angels are always thought by the popular imagination to be arrayed.

Now for this derivation of the idea of soul he offers no positive evidence except that many people held fire to be the living principle in man, and that the kobolds were popularly supposed to be fire spirits. But he might as well argue that the idea of soul came from perceiving a watery element in many things, and try to establish his view by recalling that some people thought water the principle of all things, and that the nereids or the kelpies were popularly supposed to be water-spirits. Then if psychical conceptions were of fiery origin we should find some traces of such an origin in their actual colouring. They betray none. Savages think of the soul as breath, as air, as pulsing blood, as the heart, as a shadow, as insects, as anything you like almost, but never as fire. Again, though it is very likely that when primitive men found fire in wood they might look for it in stones and everything else as well, there is no reason why they should think there was an unseen will and power in man because there was an unseen fire in wood, unless they had been previously conscious of the duality which the analogy of fire enabled them, as they thought, the better to understand.

Another great effect of the invention of fire, according to Caspari, was the production of magic and all the circle of ideas that belongs thereto. The first magicians were the workmen who produced fire, and who for that reason came to be worshipped as gods instead of being despised as cripples. Magician worship was the religion of the period immediately succeeding the discovery of fire, and the words and power of the magician-smith prepared the way for Nature worship through giving men the idea of physical force on a larger scale than they had hitherto

dreamt of. Thunder, lightning, and every material energy were supposed to be the work of a magician-smith, like the fire producers. The stars and the sun were lit and kept burning by the magical friction of such a smith operating behind them. Those various natural objects, which had heretofore been viewed with utter indifference, became henceforth centres of engrossing interest, and once man's thoughts were turned by fire towards the macrocosm, further intellectual development followed fast.

The invention of fire gave a peculiar extension to animal worship, for such animals as were coloured like fire, black, red, yellow-which were also the only three colours primitive man distinguished-became objects of reverence; and it gave rise to phallic worship, from a supposed analogy to fire friction. And while it thus created every existing form of religion it extinguished the corpse worship which reigned before it, for it introduced the ideas of the impurity of sickness and death, which play so great a part in savage life; for sickness and death appeared to minds, dominated by the one guiding idea of fire, to be a darkening of the flame of life, and therefore to be impure. This is a very singular and inconsistent explanation to be offered by one who thinks the idea of the soul itself was suggested by the black smoke which left the flame. Fetichism was the only form of worship which did not arise directly out of the invention of fire, and in the age immediately following it. It is the youngest of the religions, instead of the oldest, as it used to be considered, and it only arose in a comparatively late period, when men sought to obtain by art a means of enabling their imagination to realize the invisible agents whom they worshipped.

Now it would carry me away from the immediate scope of the present paper to discuss all these various hypotheses; but it is obvious at first sight that if the later religions have originated in the way Caspari indicates, then they have a different psychological root from the more primitive system of the Stone Period. The element of wonder has come into play, and, working on the new-born ideas of spirit and magic, has turned out a product essentially different even in kind from anything to which the mere operation of emotions of love and fear, as these exist even in the lower animals, could conduct. But if, as I have endeavoured to show, the idea of spirit did not take its rise in the manner Caspari says it did, and if it must have belonged to the earlier period as well as to the later, then his whole system breaks down at its very foundations. What he subsequently builds on these is so slenderly confirmed by any evidence he adduces, and is so entirely matter of hypothesis and conjecture-of wood, hay, and stubble-that under the fire of criticism it will at once take the course he describes, and pass off into nothing but white clouds resting wholly in the air.

JOHN RAE.

VOTERS NOT VOTES:

THE RELATIVE STRENGTH OF POLITICAL PARTIES AS SHOWN BY THE LAST TWO GENERAL ELECTIONS.

THE

HE conclusions arrived at in the following paper will be unpalatable to both Liberals and Conservatives: to the former, because they show how exaggerated an effect is given by the Parliamentary representation of Great Britain to the Liberal feeling undoubtedly predominant in 1880; to the latter, because they demonstrate that the Conservative parliamentary majority of 1874 was certainly twice as large as it ought to have been, while it is open to question whether a small Liberal majority would not have been more in accordance with the opinion of the nation.

My remarks will be brief, because the value of this attempt to ascertain the relative proportions of Liberal to Conservative voters, not votes, lies in the accuracy of the subjoined tables. To subject that accuracy to the criticism of all interested in impeaching it is my earnest desire, and hence I give the details throughout, because it is then a comparatively easy task to check them. The results seem to show conclusively that the present system of electoral representation is radically faulty, and that it is imperative that politicians of both sides should attempt to devise some method more approaching perfection, which there will be an opportunity of introducing into the new Reform Act of 1882. To suggest any such method is not in any way, however, the object of the present paper.

As a commentary on the absurdity of comparing the proportion of Liberal and Conservative feeling in any group of constituencies by the mode, now usually adopted, of assuming them to be in the same ratio as that of the gross votes cast on each side, I may quote the following passage from the Fortnightly Review for May, 1880:-" London, we may remark in passing, consists of ten boroughs, returning twenty-two members. Of this number fourteen are Liberal and eight are Conser