ne and
accredited with life-giving attributes. There are no such reasons for
assigning life-giving powers or the female sex to the mandrake. The
claim that its magical properties are due to the fancied resemblance of
its root to a human being is wholly untenable.[241] The roots of many
plants are at least as manlike; and, even if this character was the
exclusive property of the mandrake, how does it help to explain the
remarkable repetory of quite arbitrary and fantastic properties and the
female sex assigned to the plant? Sir James Frazer's claim[242] that
"such beliefs and practices illustrate the primitive tendency to
personify nature" is a gratuitous and quite irrelevant assumption, which
offers no explanation whatsoever of the specific and arbitrary nature of
the form assumed by the personification. But when we investigate the
historical development of the peculiar attributes of the cowry-shell,
and appreciate why and how they were acquired, any doubt as to the
source from which the mandrake obtained its "magic" is removed; and
with it the fallacy of Sir James Frazer's wholly unwarranted claims is
also exposed.

If we ignore Sir James Frazer's naive speculations we can make use of
the compilations of evidence which he makes with such remarkable
assiduity. But it is more profitable to turn to the study of the
remarkable lectures which Dr. Rendel Harris has been delivering in this
room[243] during the last few years. Our genial friend has been
cultivating his garden on the slopes of Olympus,[244] and has been
plucking the rich fruits of his ripe scholarship and nimble wit. At the
same time, with rougher implements and cruder methods, I have been
burrowing in the depths of the earth, trying to recover information
concerning the habits and thoughts of mankind many centuries before
Dionysus and Apollo, and Artemis and Aphrodite, were dreamt of.

In the course of these subterranean gropings no one was more surprised
than I was to discover that I was getting entangled in the roots of the
same plants whose golden fruit Dr. Rendel Harris was gathering from his
Olympian heights. But the contrast in our respective points of view was
perhaps responsible for the different appearance the growths assumed.

To drop the metaphor, while he was searching for the origins of the
deities a few centuries before the Christian era began, I was finding
their more or less larval forms flourishing more than twenty centuries
before the comm