to die or to win supremacy.  There must have been aeons before the dawn even of conscious animism, and the experiment of trying sympathetic magic was, when first attempted, probably regarded as a master-stroke of genius.  The Stone Age itself was a long era of great if slow progress in civilisation, and the evolution of the practices and ideas which emerge as the concomitants of its agricultural stage, when closely regarded, bear testimony to the mind’s capacity for religious progress in the light of experience and intelligent experiment, and at the same time to the errors into which it fell.  The Stone Age has left its sediment in all the folk-lore of the world.  To the casual observer many of the ideas embedded in it may seem a mass of error, and so they are when judged unhistorically, but when viewed critically, and at the same time historically, they afford many glimpses of prehistoric genius in a world where life was of necessity a great experiment.  The folk-lore of the world reveals for the same stages of civilisation a wonderful uniformity and homogeneity, as Dr. J. G. Frazer has abundantly shown in his Golden Bough.  This uniformity is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and their environment, along lines of thought directed by the momentum given by the traditions of millennia, and the survival in history of the men who carefully regarded them.  The apparently unreasoned prohibitions often known as ‘taboos,’ many of which still persist even in modern civilised life, have their roots in ideas and experiences which no speculation of ours can now completely fathom, however much we may guess at their origin.  Many of these ancient prohibitions have vanished under new conditions, others have often survived from a real or supposed harmony with new experiences, that have arisen in the course of man’s history.  After passing through a stage when he was too preoccupied with his material cares and wants to consider whether he was haunted or not, early man in the Celtic world as elsewhere, after long epochs of vague unrest, came to realise that he was somehow haunted in the daytime as well as at night, and it was this sense of being haunted that impelled his intellect and his imagination to seek some explanation of his feelings.  Primitive man came to seek a solution not of the Universe as a whole (for of this he had no conception), but of the local Universe, in which he played a part.  In dealing with Celtic folk-lore, it is very remarkable how it mirrors the characteristic local colouring and scenery of the districts in which it has originated.  In a country like Wales, for example, it is the folk-lore of springs, caves, mountains, lakes, islands, and the forms of its imagination, here as elsewhere, reflect unmistakably the land of its origin.  Where it depicts an ‘other world,’ that ‘other world’ is either on an island or it is a land