According to the belief of the Miao-tse, an aboriginal tribe of the province of Canton, in China, the souls of unborn children are kept in the garden of two deities called "Flower-Grandfather" and "Flower-Grandmother," and when to these have been made by a priest sacrifices of hens or swine, the children are let out and thus appear among men. As a charm against barrenness, these people put white paper into a basket and have the priest make an invocation. The white paper represents the deities, and the ceremony is called kau fa; i.e. "Flower Invocation."

In Japan, a certain Lake Fakone, owing its origin to an earthquake, and now surrounded by many temples, is looked upon as the abode of the souls of children about to be born (326. I. 3).

Certain Californian Indians, near Monterey, thought that "the dead retreated to verdant islands in the West, while awaiting the birth of the infants whose souls they were to form " (396. III. 525).

In Calabria, Italy, when a butterfly flits around a baby's cradle, it is believed to be either an angel or a baby's soul, and a like belief prevails in other parts of the world; and we have the classic personification of Psyche, the soul, as a butterfly.

Among the uneducated peasantry of Ireland, the pure white butterfly is thought to be the soul of the sinless and forgiven dead on the way to Paradise, whilst the spotted ones are the embodiments of spirits condemned to spend their time of purgatory upon earth, the number of the sins corresponding with the number of spots on the wings of the insect (418. 192).

In early Christian art and folk-lore, the soul is often figured as a dove, and in some heathen mythologies of Europe as a mouse, weasel, lizard, etc.

In various parts of the world we find that children, at death, go to special limbos, purgatories, or heavens, and the folk-lore of the subject must be read at length in the mythological treatises.

If a

The Andaman Islanders "believe that every child which is conceived has had a prior existence, but only as an infant. woman who has lost a baby is again about to become a mother, the name borne by the deceased is bestowed on the fœtus, in the expectation that it will prove to be the same child born again. Should it be found at birth that the babe is of the same sex as the one who died, the identity is considered to be sufficiently established; but, if otherwise, the deceased one is said to be

under the rau- (Ficus laccifera), in châ·itân- (Hades)." Under this tree, upon the fruit of which they live, also dwell "the spirits and souls of all children who die before they cease to be entirely dependent on their parents (i.e. under six years of age)" (498. 86, 93). There was a somewhat similar myth in Venezuela (448. 297).

Mr. Codrington gives some interesting illustrations of this belief from Melanesia (25. 311):·

"In the island of Aurora, Maewo, in the New Hebrides, women sometimes have a notion that the origin, beginning, of one of their children is a cocoanut or a bread-fruit, or something of that kind; and they believe, therefore, that it would be injurious to the child to eat that food. It is a fancy of the woman, before the birth of the child, that the infant will be the nunu, which may be translated the echo, of such an object. Women also fancy that a child is the nunu of some dead person. It is not a notion of metempsychosis, as if the soul of the dead person returned in the new-born child; but it is thought that there is so close a connection that the infant takes the place of the deceased. At Mota, also, in the Banks Islands, there was the belief that each person had a source of his being, his origin, in some animate or inanimate thing, which might, under some circumstances, become known to him." As Mr. Codrington suggests, such beliefs throw light upon the probable origin of totemism and its development.

Spirit-World.

Mrs. Stevenson informs us that "although the Sia do not believe in a return of the spirits of their dead when they have once entered Shipapo [the lower world], there was once an exception to this." The priestly tale, as told to Mrs. Stevenson, is as follows (538. 143):

"When the years were new, and this village had been built perhaps three years, all the spirits of our dead came here for a great feast. They had bodies such as they had before death; wives recognized husbands, husbands wives, children parents, and parents children. Just after sundown the spirits began arriving, only a few passing over the road by daylight, but after dark they came in great crowds and remained until near dawn. They tar

ried but one night; husbands and wives did not sleep together; had they done so, the living would have surely died. When the hour of separation came, there was much weeping, not only among the living, but the dead. The living insisted upon going with the dead, but the dead declared they must wait, that they could not pass through the entrance to the other world; they must first die or grow old and again become little children to be able to pass through the door of the world for the departed. It was then that the Sia first learned all about their future home. They learned that the fields were vast, the pastures beautiful, the mountains high, the lakes and rivers clear like crystal, and the wheat and cornfields flourishing. During the day the spirits sleep, and at night they work industriously in the fields. The moon is father to the dead as the sun is father to the living, the dead resting when the sun travels, for at this time they see nothing; it is when the sun returns to his home at night that the departed spirits work and pass about in their world below. The home of the departed spirits is in the world first inhabited by the Sia."

We learn further: "It is the aim of the Sia to first reach the intermediate state at the time the body ceases to develop, and then return gradually back to the first condition of infancy; at such periods one does not die, but sleeps to awake in the spiritworld as a little child. Many stories have come to the Sia by those who have died only for a time; the heart becomes still and the lips cold, and the spirit passes to the entrance of the other world and looks in, but does not enter, and yet it sees all, and in a short time returns to inhabit its earthly body. Great alarm is felt when one returns in this way to life, but much faith is put in the stories afterwards told by the one who has passed over the road of death."

In the belief of these Indians of North America we see some foreshadowing of the declaration of Jesus, a rude expression of the fundamental thought underlying his words:

"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in nowise enter therein."

Certain Siouan Indians think: "The stars are all deceased

men.

When a child is born, a star descends and appears on earth in human form; after death it reascends and appears as a star in heaven" (433. 508). How like this is the poet's thought:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar."

CHAPTER XI.

CHILDREN'S FLOWERS, PLANTS, AND TREES.

As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourishes.

A child at play in meadows green,
Plucking the fragrant flowers,

Chasing the white-winged butterflies,

So sweet are childhood's hours.

- Psalm ciii. 15.

We meet wi' blythesome and kythesome cheerie weans,

Daffin' and laughin' far adoon the leafy lanes.

Wi' gowans and buttercups buskin' the thorny wands-
Sweetly singin' wi' the flower-branch wavin' in their hands.

Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in a wood, one of the trees were to speak to me.— Sir John Lubbock.

O who can tell

The hidden power of herbs, and might of magic spell? - Spenser.

Plant Life and Human Life.

FLOWERS, plants, and trees have ever been interwoven with the fate of man in the minds of poets and folk-thinkers. The great Hebrew psalmist declared: "As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth," and the old Greeks said beautifully, οίηπερ φύλλων γενεή, τοιήδε καὶ ἀνδρῶν, “ as is the generation of leaves, so is also that of men"; or, to quote the words of Homer (Iliad, vi. 146):

"Like as the generation of leaves, so also is that of men ;

For the wind strews the leaves on the ground; but the forest,

Putting forth fresh buds, grows on, and spring will presently return.

Thus with the generation of men; the one blooms, the other fades away."