correct, he proceeds to confirm its accuracy by reasoning inductively and showing that a similarity, too marked to be the result of mere accident or coincidence, exists in the practices which primitive man has adopted, throughout the world, and which can only be explained on the assumption that by methods, differing indeed in detail but substantially the same in principle, endeavours have been, and still are being, made to secure an identical object, viz. to obtain food and thus to sustain life.  The various methods adopted both in the past and the present are invariably associated in one form or another with the invocation of magical influences.  The primitive savage, Miss Harrison says, “is a man of action.”  He does not pray.  He acts.  If he wishes for sun or wind or rain, “he summons his tribe, and dances a sun dance or a wind dance or a rain dance.”  If he wants bear’s flesh to eat, he does not pray to his god for strength to outwit or to master the bear, but he rehearses his hunt in a bear dance.  If he notices that two things occur one after the other, his untrained intellect at once jumps to the conclusion that one is the cause and the other the effect.  Thus in Australia—­a specially fertile field for anthropological research, which has recently been explored with great thoroughness and intelligence by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen—­the cry of the plover is frequently heard before rain falls.  Therefore, when the natives wish for rain they sing a rain song in which the cry of that bird is faithfully imitated.

Before alluding to the special point which Miss Harrison deals with in Ancient Art and Ritual, it will be as well to glance at the views which she sets forth in her previous illuminating treatise entitled Themis.  The former is in reality a continuation of the latter work.  The view heretofore generally entertained as regards the anthropomorphic gods of Greece has been that the conception of the deity preceded the adoption of the ritual.  Moreover, one school of anthropologists ably represented by Professor Ridgeway, has maintained that the phenomena of vegetation spirits, totemism, etc., rose from primary elements, notably from the belief in the existence of the soul after the death of the body.  Miss Harrison and those who agree with her hold that this view involves an anthropological heresy.  She deprecates the use of the word “anthropomorphic,” which she describes as clumsy and too narrow.  She prefers the expression [Greek:  anthropophyes] used by Herodotus (i. 131), signifying “of human growth.”  She points out that the anthropomorphism of the Greeks was preceded by theriomorphism and phytomorphism, that the ritual was “prior to the God,” that so long as man was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle for bare existence his sole care was to obtain food, and that during this stage of his existence his religious observances took almost exclusively the form of magical inducements to the earth to renew that fertility which, by the periodicity of the seasons, was at times temporarily suspended.  It was only at a later period, when the struggle for existence had become less arduous, that the belief in the efficacy of magical rites decayed, and that in matters of religion the primitive Greeks “shifted from a nature-god to a human-nature god.”