makes good his escape. The Gallas of Abyssinia, who pay direct worship to their sacred tree Wodanabe, and pray to it for riches, health, and other blessings, or the Gauchos of South America reverencing with every kind of offering a solitary tree on the Pampas, are intellectually allied with our own forefathers against whose similar religion the early Christian missionaries waged such incessant warfare. The cathedrals of Metz and Strasburg are said to stand on ground where in former times stood the sacred grove; and in spite of the Benedicts and Bonifaces, who burned or cut down with surprising impunity the treegods of our ancestors, there are still among us persons who still see fit to pour libations of milk or beer over the roots of certain demi-gods of the forest. There is no part of the world where travellers have not noticed trees hung all over with rags and other things; and it has been suggested that the origin of this custom was the idea that sufferers from disease might in this way transfer their malady from themselves to any hapless person who might pass the tree. But it accords better with all the accounts of trees so decorated to regard the hangings as direct votive offerings to the tree itself; for it is not merely pieces of clothing that are suspended, but iron or brass trinkets, reindeer hides, kettles, spoons, and even articles of food. And all these customs connected with the worship of trees, or implying a belief in their divinity, may be traced back simply to the old primitive thought which ascribed to trees, as to other objects, actual human attributes and a conscious personality: a state of thought for the existence of which there is abundant evidence, and which may be fitly illustrated by the following absurd stories from Samoa.

Tutunga, the paper mulberry, and Salato, a stinging tree, were originally two brothers who quarrelled about boundaries, and whose parents, to whom they referred the matter, decided that the two should separate, and that Salato should go farther inland, and be sacred and respected, while Tutunga should be liable to be cut and skinned and made to cover the bodies of men. And so it came to pass, for while the paper mulberry is made into cloth, Sa

lato is so sacred that no one dares to touch it.

Again, Toa and Pale were brothers, who, wishing to escape from a cannibal king of Fiji, fled to the bush and became trees. Knowing that a party were coming to the woods to look for a straight tree, wherewith to make the keel of a new royal canoe, Pale changed himself into a crooked stick overrun with creepers, while Toa, against his brother's advice and to his own detriment, became a tall tree.

So in India the Toolusee plant, to which the Hindoos erect pillars near their houses, and whose wood and leaves they regard as sacred, was originally a very religious lady who prayed to Vishnu that she might become his wife, and was for that, by Lukshnee, Vishnu's prior wife, changed into the plant which is now so piously revered.

The principal part played by trees in popular mythology is in connection with. transformation scenes of this sort, there being obviously no greater difficulty in conceiving the sudden conversion of a human being into a tree than into a rock or a star. In the Tyrol you may still see an Alpine rose, which sprang from the blood of a girl who in the defence of her innocence lost her life. Then there is an Austrian tale of a girl whom, for falling in love with a soldier, her mother cursed into a maple tree; her body became rough, her skin turned to bark, her hands to branches, and her hair to leaves. Near Nuremberg are three trees which were originally maidens who decoyed strangers to a wood and there robbed and murdered them they were at last struck by lightning, and turned into trees, and their cries may still sometimes be heard after the evening's bells have ceased to ring. In a certain state of culture there is nothing incredible in this kind of occurrence.

An Al

All through the middle ages stories of conversion into trees abound. satian girl, praying constantly to the Virgin that she may remain unmarried, is turned into a lime tree which stands near a church dedicated to the Virgin. Or, again, Charlemagne, having defeated and slaughtered a number of Saracens, wishes to bury both friends and foes, yet to separate the Christians from the infidels; in his perplexity he prays ear

nestly one night, and the next morning beholds the bodies of the enemy changed into thorn trees. And there is the story of the two lovers in the old ballad preserved in Percy's Reliques :

Margaret was buried in the lower chancel,
And William in the higher;

Out of her breast there sprang a rose,

And out of his a brier.

They grew till they grew unto the church top,
And then they could grow no higher,
And there they tied in a true lovers' knot,
Which made all the people admire.

The old German story of Tristran and Isolde, who after death reunite as trees in the churchyard, corresponds in the main idea with the tale of William and Margaret; and a story from Afghanistan may be compared with both. The hostility of the parents of two lovers proving a bar to their union, the lady was married to a man for whom she had no affection. She planted two flowers in her garden, and called them respectively after her lover and her husband. One morning the lover's flower was faded, and that very day the lady's husband announced to her that he had killed him in fight. Thereupon she died, and was buried near her lover. From the spot two trees sprang, the interlacing of whose branches pointed to the reunion of the lovers in a continued arboreal existence.

This

Also from China a similar story comes. A certain Chinese king, coveting the wife of his secretary, imprisoned and killed the latter. The widow, to escape from the king, threw herself down from a high terrace, and so died, begging the king in a letter to let her corpse be buried with her husband's. favor the monarch refused, and had them buried at some distance apart from one another. But it was of no avail, for that night two cedars sprang up, which in a few days had made such progress in growth that both their roots be low and their branches above met and intermingled.

There is also a Roumanian legend of two lovers, who, having been buried together in a cemetery, embraced shortly afterward in the forms respectively of a pine tree and a vine. So that this type of tree legend seems to be very widely spread over the world, illustrating the remarkable mental uniformity of differ

ent races from which such childish traditions spring.

Many of the old classical stories of Greek and Roman mythology have really no higher interest and probably no deeper meaning than the foregoing legends. The nymph Myrsine, at first the favorite, and then, for her superior running powers, the rival of the goddess Athene, being killed by the latter became the first myrtle, in that form keeping the gods in mind of the crime of the goddess.

Cypresses in Greek fancy were certain tall girls, of whose tall girls, of whose dancing powers, when compared with their own, the goddesses were so jealous that they threw them into a marsh, where they died and were changed into cypresses, tall as they had been in their human shape. The elder tree was originally a famous Hamadryad of Arcadia, saved by change into that form at the hands of Diana from the importunate attentions of the god Pan. The pine-fir was a nymph, beloved of both Pan and Boreas; the preference of the nymph for the former led to her murder by the other; and the gods in pity changed her into a tree, which continued to weep when Boreas blew and whose tears might still be seen in the drops that exuded from the trunk. The laurel, of course, was Daphne, changed by the gods into a tree, to save her from the pursuit of Apollo.

This latter story has been compared with the Vedic myth of Urvâçî, the nymph pursued by the Prince Puravanas; and the two names respectively being taken to mean the Dawn and the Sun, we are assured that the story of Daphne and Apollo must also allude to the pursuit of the dawn by the solar orb. But it is not always Apollo who pursues; sometimes it is Pan, sometimes a merely human lover. And as the pursuer cannot always be resolved into the sun, so it is often equally impossible, with whatever philological ingenuity, to resolve the pursued into the

Hence if some myths of the sort do not refer to the sun and the dawn, is it not possible that few, if any, really do, and that the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo is simply the story of the pursuit of a maiden by a god? When it was not thought impossible for

gods to love mortals, what more natural than that stories should abound of importunate deities pursuing human damsels, and of those damsels owing their escape to that unfailing resource of all primitive story-tellers, namely, instantaneous transformation? Surely this is a more natural origin for such stories than forgetfulness of the meaning of words meaning sun and dawn. The latter cause, though it might add to the number of such stories, seems in no sense necessary to account for their existence. In fact their existence hardly seems to call for explanation at all; their absence would call for it much more.

Writers who favor the solar interpretation of mythology see of course the difficulty of a merely partial application of their theory, and therefore as a rule they apply it with indiscriminate hardihood to everything of the sort that demands explanation. If, for instance, it is in the empty trunk of an oak that the Dioscuri hide themselves from their enemies, we are told by Signor de Gubernatis that the oak here seems to represent the tree of night where the evening hides, and whence the light of day issues every morning. If in the Kalevala a dwarf from the sea, who becomes afterward a giant, tears up an oak tree plant ed by the son of the solar orb, the tree is said to be the dawn itself, while the dwarf means really the sun, which chases away the dawn and tears up the tree that represents it. If Phyllis, abandoned by Demophoon, hangs herself upon an almond tree, and an almond tree springs from her tomb, leafless till Demophoon comes to embrace it, Demophoon evidently refers to the spring sun, while Phyllis as evidently represents winter, the funereal season of the year. According to an Andalusian legend the Virgin and her family came once to an orange tree guarded by a blind man. The latter had his sight restored on granting an orange apiece to each member of the Holy Family. Here, again, "the myth is clear. The blind man here is the night which guards the trees of the Hesperides, which receives the setting sun and makes appear the moon. As soon as one has gathered the fruits of the lunar tree, the night disappears, the blind receives his sight,

the sun of morning, which sees and makes see, illumines again the horizon."

One can only suggest, with reference to such a method of interpretation, that "the fruits of the lunar tree" most fitly to be gathered of it would be the watchful supervision of a lunatic asylum. Why, in the name of all that is sensible, resort to these far-fetched explanations, when the story itself is its own sufficient explanation? What more natural than that the Dioscuri, if they needed a hiding-place, should resort to a hollow oak tree; or that Phyllis, deserted by her lover, should hang herself and be transformed into a tree? It is all in strict accordance with the elementary rules of primitive story-telling. There is no mystery save that which is of the mythologists' own making. No absurdities or incongruities of mythology require explanation if we are but content to regard the primitive human mind as naturally blossoming in the direction of the absurd. It is only the assumption that mankind started in the world with a complete set of theological and other truths, which throws any obscurity over the matter at all; and for this assumption where are the arguments?

A survival of the notion that trees might be transformed human beings is traceable in the qualities of human consciousness still popularly attributed to them. They are silent but severe judges of human misconduct. Many a lime or oak has ceased to put forth leaves after witnessing a treasonable conspiracy hatched beneath its branches. Three ladies having left a certain wood to a German parish on condition that the church bells should ring every day for evening prayer, the trees all withered when the authorities suspended the practice, and only recovered when they resumed it.

Often, too, they attest the innocence of an injured mortal. Near an old German castle is a lime, which a boy, accused of killing his master, planted with its head in the earth, to attest his innocence if it grew and flourished. Two friends were attacked by robbers in a wood, and one of them was killed. The robbers having been put to flight by a flash of lightning, the surviving friend, found kneeling at the side of his dead companion, was condemned to death for