Let us proceed to illustrate these propositions in the case of birth. The ceremonies attendant upon this event need not take place immediately after it; they may be deferred some days, weeks, or months; they will still fall under the same category, as designed to mark the child's entry into the world. Their form will naturally vary according to the state of civilization of the nation observing them; but notwithstanding this there is a strange similarity among them. In Samoa, for instance, "if the little stranger was a boy, the umbilicus was cut on a club, that he might grow up to be brave in war. If of the other sex, it was done on the board on which they beat out the bark of which they make their native cloth. Cloth-making is the work of women; and their wish was, that the little girl should grow up and prove useful to the family in her proper occupation" (N. Y., p. 175). I have added Mr. Turner's observation to render the nature of this ceremony plainer. It appears hardly religious; yet when we consider the symbolical means by which the end is sought to be attained, and that among savages so rude as those of Polynesia religion would have no higher practical aims than to make the boys good warriors, and the women industrious cloth-makers, we may admit that even this elementary rite has in it something of a religious consecration. When secular objects are attained by mystical ceremonials, which have no direct tendency to produce the desired result, we may generally conclude that religious belief is at the bottom of them. In the present instance this conclusion is still further strengthened by the description given by the same author of a similar ceremony in another island of the Polynesian group. There, when a boy is born, "a priest cuts the umbilicus on a particular stone from Lifu, that the youth may be _stone_-hearted in battle. The priest, too, at the moment of the operation, must have a vessel of water before him, dyed black as ink, that the boy when he grows up, may be courageous to go anywhere to battle on a pitch-dark night, and thus, from his very birth, the little fellow is consecrated to war" (N. Y., pp. 423, 424). Here the religious nature of the operation is explicitly proved by the presence of the priest, the inevitable agent in such communications between God and man. Another missionary to the same race—the Polynesian islanders—informs us that among these people mothers dedicated their offspring to various deities, but principally to Hiro, the god of thieves, and Oro, the god of war. "Most parents, however, were anxious that their children should become brave and renowned warriors," and with this end they dedicated them, by means of ceremonies beginning before parturition, and ending after it, to the god Oro. The principal ceremony after birth consisted in the priest catching the spirit of the god, by a peculiar process, and imparting it to the child. Here again the presence of the priest, and the formal dedication to a god—even