The sea creatures who owe their origin to Sedna belong to her and she controls them. She protects them, and causes the storms which bring wreckage and famine to the kyakers and sealers. Hence she is in Eskimo mythology inimical to mankind, the source of the worst evils they know, a spirit who has to be propitiated or quelled by ceremony, as the case may be. She is considered to be of enormous stature, with two plaits of hair, each thick as an arm, and she has only one eye. The other was pierced and put out in her drowning struggle. The writer has seen an example of this sort of sacrifice in actual life, and it redeems the story of Sedna’s father from the senseless selfishness of which it seems to be compounded by some narrators. Two boats containing a party of hunters were returning from sealing, when a squall struck them. Before sail could be taken in, one boat overturned and the men were thrown into the water. They all climbed back except one, who was numbed with cold and dazed with shock. He did not sink immediately, being held up by his deerskins. He even drifted close by the boat, and easily within reach. One man, indeed, did reach out and touch him with an oar, but when he failed to grasp it the general decision was to let him drown. He was “material for the Tongak” spirits, claimed by the Spirit of the sea—as was Sedna in the legend. He simply drowned in the sight of the others, and of the women on shore, who covered their faces with their hoods and gave the death wails, i.e., began to shriek and howl in the frenzied manner proper to the circumstances. It is possible that no better story than that of Sedna (with all its elements of phantasy, human emotion, poetry and savagery) could be found in illustration of a good deal Dr. Marrett has to tell us in his “Psychology and Folk Lore,” by way of reducing primitive folk-lore and primitive procedure (religious or medical, or both, arising out of it) to a science of primitive psychology. His masterly analysis of the outlook of the wholly untutored mind on the phenomena of cause and effect demonstrates quite clearly the sincerity and the obviousness of the “savage” rites and customs which seem to us so barbaric, irrelevant and monstrous.