guess might become an integral part of his tribe’s creed.  That would be their cosmogony.  And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions.  It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the astronomy of his tribe henceforth.  Absurd enough:  but—­as every man who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know—­no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record.  Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge:  must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, which had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.

But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed or is doomed to pass.

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribe than themselves.  What would be the result?  They would fight valiantly at first, like wasps.  But what if they began to fail?  Was not the wasp-king angry with them?  Had not he deserted them?  He must be appeased; he must have his revenge.  They would take a captive, and offer him to the wasps.  So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty years ago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captive girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn.  I would not tell the story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my argument.  What were those Red Men thinking of?  What chain of misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a device for making the crops grow?  Who can tell?  Who can make the crooked straight, or number that which is wanting?  As said Solomon of old, so must we—­“The foolishness of fools is folly.”  One thing only we can say of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means of ridding themselves of their fear.

But what if the wasp tribe had no captives?  They would offer slaves.  What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps?  They would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought out of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom they only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters.  And so the veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.