e they brought it, according to every man's
power, then they make another Pirua, with the same
ceremonies, saying that they renue it, to the ende that the
seede of the Mays may not perish.

The idea that the maize can speak need not surprise us; the Mexican
held much the same belief, according to Sahagun:--

It was thought that if some grains of maize fell on the
ground he who saw them lying there was bound to lift them,
wherein, if he failed, he harmed the maize, which plained
itself of him to God, saying, 'Lord, punish this man, who saw
me fallen and raised me not again; punish him with famine,
that he may learn not to hold me in dishonour.'

Well, in all this affair of the Scotch kernababy, and the Peruvian
_Mama cora_, we need no explanation beyond the common simple ideas of
human nature. We are not obliged to hold, either that the Peruvians
and Scotch are akin by blood, nor that, at some forgotten time, they
met each other, and borrowed each other's superstitions.[13] Again,
when we find Odysseus sacrificing a black sheep to the dead,[14] and
when we read that the Ovahereroes in South Africa also appease with a
black sheep the spirits of the departed, we do not feel it necessary
to hint that the Ovahereroes are of Greek descent, or have borrowed
their ritual from the Greeks. The connection between the colour black,
and mourning for the dead, is natural and almost universal.

Examples like these might be adduced in any number. We might show how,
in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies,
and pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of
Accad in remotest antiquity. We might remark the Australian black
putting sharp bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone
by, that the enemy may be lamed; and we might point to Boris Godunof
forbidding the same practice among the Russians. We might watch
Scotch, and Australians, and Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading
dust round the body of a dead man, that the footprints of his ghost,
or of other ghosts, may be detected next morning. We might point to a
similar device in a modern novel, where the presence of a ghost is
suspected, as proof of the similar workings of the Australian mind and
of the mind of Mrs. Riddell. We shall later turn to ancient Greece,
and show how the serpent-dances, the habit of smearing the body with
clay, and other odd rites of the mysteries, were common to Hellen