ood and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round
about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree
that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like
fronds of the tamarind." (3)

(1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.

(2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.

(3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.

There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
(and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very
near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to
a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the
Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down
to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the
Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to
fertilize them. (2)

(1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.

(2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.

One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite
indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was
instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day
who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the
world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and
intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction
of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the
first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was
hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more
conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and
the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.

The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in
the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which
his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
assimilations. Att