So he gets at a third class of objects—­things which he cannot eat, and which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him, out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents.  There are natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones, floods, fires, avalanches.  They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends of their own.  If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more natural than to suppose that there is some giant up there who threw it at him?  If he had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walking underneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killed him.  For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he were not hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to prevent that by doing him a mischief first.  Besides, the man might have a wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient law common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor.  Such is the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek] of St. Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very acute animal passions—­hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear.  It is with the working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.

So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff, who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wise concerning most other natural phenomena.  There is something in them which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him; and if he cannot destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quite boundless.  There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to look with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on the useless and poisonous Euphorbia canariensis.  It is to them—­according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth—­a demon who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of stones, “screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised stalks.”

And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanent terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden and seemingly capricious?—­towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights, pestilences?  We know too well what it has been—­ one of blind, and therefore often cruel, fear.  How could it be otherwise?  Was Theophrastus’s superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on every round stone?  I think there was a great deal to be said for him.  This worship of Baetyli was rational enough.  They were aerolites, fallen from heaven.  Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?—­to testify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them at men, and who though he had missed his shot that time might not miss it the next?  I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy, or Christianity, saw