impossible to avoid thinking at first sight that the butterflies themselves have been attacked by real fungi."
On recalling the fact that, a few generations ago, all civilized people believed, as many civilized people believe still, that decaying meat is itself transformed into maggots, on being reminded that among our peasantry, at the present time, the thread-like aquatic worm Gordius is said to be horse-hair that has fallen into the water and become living, we shall see it to be inevitable that these extreme resemblances should suggest the notion of actual metamorphoses. That this notion, so suggested, becomes a belief, is a proved fact. In Java and neighboring regions inhabited by it, that marvelous insect, "the walking leaf," is positively asserted to be a leaf that has become animated. What else should it be? In the absence of that explanation of mimicry so happily hit upon by Mr. Bates, no natural origin for such wonderful likenesses between things wholly unallied can be imagined. And, while there is no generalized knowledge, there is nothing to prevent acceptance of these apparent transformations as real transformations; indeed, apparent and real are not distinguished until criticism and skepticism have made some progress.
Once established, the belief in transformation extends itself without resistance to other classes of things. Between an egg and a young bird, there is a far greater contrast in appearance and structure than between one mammal and another. The tadpole, with a tail and no limbs, differs from a young frog with four limbs and no tail, more than a man differs from a hyena; for both of these have four limbs, and both laugh. Evidently, then, the natural metamorphoses so abundant throughout Nature, joined with these apparent metamorphoses which the primitive man inevitably confounds with them, originate the conception of metamorphoses in general, which rises into an explanation everywhere employed without check.
Here, again, we have to note that, while initiating and fostering the notion that things of all kinds may suddenly change their forms, the experiences of transformation confirm the notion of duality. Each object is not only what it seems, but is potentially something else.
What is a shadow? Familiar as mature life has made us with shadows, and almost automatic as has become the interpretation of them in terms of physical causation, we do not ask how they look to the absolutely ignorant.
Those, from whose minds the thoughts of childhood have not wholly vanished, will remember the interest they once felt in watching their shadows—moving legs and arms and fingers, and observing how corresponding parts of the shadows moved. By a child a shadow is thought of as an entity. I do not assert this without evidence. A memorandum made in 1858, in elucidation of the ideas described in the just-published book of Williams on the Feejeeans, concerns a little
