d merely as exhibiting this most-developed system. If
any specific comparison were made, which it cannot rationally be, it
would be made with some much lower vertebrate form than the human.]

THE ORIGIN OF ANIMAL WORSHIP.

[_First published in_ The Fortnightly Review _for May,_ 1870.]

Mr. McLennan's recent essays on the Worship of Animals and Plants have
done much to elucidate a very obscure subject. By pursuing in this case,
as before in another case, the truly scientific method of comparing the
phenomena presented by existing uncivilized races with those which the
traditions of civilized races present, he has rendered both of them more
comprehensible than they were before.

It seems to me, however, that Mr. McLennan gives but an indefinite
answer to the essential question--How did the worship of animals and
plants arise? Indeed, in his concluding paper, he expressly leaves this
problem unsolved; saying that his "is not an hypothesis explanatory of
the origin of _Totemism_, be it remembered, but an hypothesis
explanatory of the animal and plant worship of the ancient nations." So
that we have still to ask--Why have savage tribes so generally taken
animals and plants and other things as totems? What can have induced
this tribe to ascribe special sacredness to one creature, and that tribe
to another? And if to these questions the reply is, that each tribe
considers itself to be descended from the object of its reverence, then
there presses for answer the further question--How came so strange a
notion into existence? If this notion occurred in one case only, we
might set it down to some whim of thought or some illusive occurrence.
But appealing, as it does, with multitudinous variations among so many
uncivilized races in different parts of the world, and having left
numerous marks in the superstitions of extinct civilized races, we
cannot assume any special or exceptional cause. Moreover, the general
cause, whatever it may be, must be such as does not negative an
aboriginal intelligence like in nature to our own. After studying the
grotesque beliefs of savages, we are apt to suppose that their reason is
not as our reason. But this supposition is inadmissible. Given the
amount of knowledge which primitive men possess, and given the imperfect
verbal symbols used by them in speech and thought, and the conclusions
they habitually reach will be those that are _relatively_ the most
rational. This must be our pos