there is some giant up there who threw it at him? If
he had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walking
underneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killed
him. For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he were
not hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to
prevent that, by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might have
a wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient
law common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such is
the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek text] of St.
Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very
acute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with the
working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.

So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff,
who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wise
concerning most other natural phenomena. There is something in them
which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him: and if he cannot
destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quite
boundless. There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to
look with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on the
useless and poisonous _Euphorbia canariensis_. It is to them--according
to Mr. Piazzi Smyth--a demon who would kill them, if it could only run
after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt
it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse
names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised
stalks."

And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanent
terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden and
seemingly capricious?--towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights,
pestilences? We know too well what it has been--one of blind, and
therefore often cruel, fear. How could it be otherwise? Was
Theophrastus's superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on every
round stone? I think there was a great deal to be said for him. This
worship of Baetyli was rational enough. They were aerolites, fallen from
heaven. Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?--to
testify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them at
men, and who though he had missed his shot that time, might not