hip of
the dead have prevailed very widely among mankind and have played a very
important part in the development of natural religion. While many
writers have duly recognised the high importance both of the belief and
of the worship, no one, so far as I know, has attempted systematically
to collect and arrange the facts which illustrate the prevalence of this
particular type of religion among the various races of mankind. A large
body of evidence lies to hand in the voluminous and rapidly increasing
literature of ethnology; but it is dispersed over an enormous number of
printed books and papers, to say nothing of the materials which still
remain buried either in manuscript or in the minds of men who possess
the requisite knowledge but have not yet committed it to writing. To
draw all those stores of information together and digest them into a
single treatise would be a herculean labour, from which even the most
industrious researcher into the dusty annals of the human past might
shrink dismayed. Certainly I shall make no attempt to perform such a
feat within the narrow compass of these lectures. But it seems to me
that I may make a useful, if a humble, contribution to the history of
religion by selecting a portion of the evidence and submitting it to my
hearers. For that purpose, instead of accumulating a mass of facts from
all the various races of mankind and then comparing them together, I
prefer to limit myself to a few races and to deal with each of them
separately, beginning with the lowest savages, about whom we possess
accurate information, and gradually ascending to peoples who stand
higher in the scale of culture. In short the method of treatment which I
shall adopt will be the descriptive rather than the comparative. I shall
not absolutely refrain from instituting comparisons between the customs
and beliefs of different races, but for the most part I shall content
myself with describing the customs and beliefs of each race separately
without reference to those of others. Each of the two methods, the
comparative and the descriptive, has its peculiar advantages and
disadvantages, and in my published writings I have followed now the one
method and now the other. The comparative method is unquestionably the
more attractive and stimulating, but it cannot be adopted without a good
deal of more or less conscious theorising, since every comparison
implicitly involves a theory. If we desire to exclude theories and
merel