[11] Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition, p. 108.
[12] The case was not exceptional. Among several tribes it was an established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it was believed to strengthen her for later births. See examples in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, Bd. xiv., pp. 460, sq.
[13] Palmer in Jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xiii., pp. 294, 399.
[14] Professor Sayce believes that the Sumerian of ancient Babylonia was genderless; and that the local gods were first endowed with sex on being adopted by the Semites.—Hibbert Lectures, p. 176.
[15] Cuoq, Lexique Algonquine, p. 21, note.
[16] The Golden Bough, Preface.
[17] Ed. Clodd, Myths and Dreams, p. 168.
[18] Besides the general works on Egyptian religion, I may note R. Pietschmann, “Aegypt. Fetischdienst und Götterglaube,” in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd. x., s. 153, sq. He points out that there was no unity in the ancient cults of Egypt, as the gods were those of the nomes only. The worship of Osiris did not prevail generally till after the sixth dynasty (p. 165).
[19] Some have explained superstition as “degenerate religion”; others as “religious error”; others (Pfleiderer) as “a pathological condition of normal belief”; but all such definitions depend on the view-point. As Roskoff remarks: “The man who is plunged in superstition is sure to hold it for the only true faith, and is contented with it so long as he is not troubled with doubts.”—Das Religionswesen der Naturvölker, p. 17.
[20] See T. Rhys Davids, Indian Buddhism, p. 29 (Hibbert Lectures), and in the first volume of the present series of lectures.