The last item we must mention here is the _misogi_. The _misogi_ is an old religious custom of lustration by bathing in cold water. In a legend of our mythical age, there is an account of this antique ritual performed by two ancestral deities in a river in Kyushu, and this ritual has come down to our day, of course with some modifications. The custom of actually bathing in the water was afterward superseded by the throwing of effigies into a river, in the annual ceremony of praying publicly to deities. In medieval Japan this usage continued to be practised at a riverside in the summer; but it is almost extinct nowadays. On the other hand, not as a public ceremony, but as a method of individual self-purification, this custom of lustration is still practised by many pious persons. Almost entirely naked, even in the winter of northern Japan, they pour on themselves several bucketfuls of cold water, and thus purify themselves from head to foot, in order to attest a very special devotion to the deities to whom they pray. This custom of bathing with its religious signification is something that cannot find its likeness anywhere else, either in northeastern Asia, or in China, or in Korea. Whence, then, did the ancient Japanese get this unique custom? Would it not be natural to suppose the custom of bathing, including its religious use, to have originated in some quarter of the torrid regions of the earth than to speak of it as initiated in the frigid zone? All the four items mentioned above ought by all means to be interpreted adequately and naturally, whatever standpoint one may take in solving ethnological questions concerning the Japanese. The hypothesis that the bulk of our forefathers might have been immigrants from northeastern Asia, is, as already said before, by itself nothing but an assertion, supported mainly by the form of certain prehistoric pottery, which may possibly be interpreted otherwise, perhaps disadvantageously, too, for the assertion. We may accept the hypothesis as probable, taking into consideration the proximity of the supposed home of our ancestors to Japan. But it avails us not at all in interpreting the points which I have enumerated above. On the contrary, if we concur with the supposition that the ruling class, also, of the Japanese has its original home in the northeastern part of the Asiatic continent like the bulk of the race, then the interpretation of the aforesaid items would become more difficult. It is true that those who would like to derive the origin of the Japanese from northeastern Asia, do not absolutely deny the existence of a certain tropical element in the final formation of the Japanese race, but generally they think that the element must have been very insignificant. They would never go so far as to look to the element for the bulk of our forefathers or for the ancestors of the ruling class. If the tropical element be as insignificant as they