The principle that what was once the serious occupation of men becomes in more advanced stages of culture the play of children, or is reduced from seriousness to mere amusement, finds illustrations in the mental as in the material world. The drum, once the serious terrifying instrument of the savage warrior, and the rattle, once the powerful emblem of the medicine man, have become the common toys of children. The bow and arrow are used for skill and sport only. In a similar way the formidable and trusted argument by analogy finds its proper field in riddles and puns. When we put the question, "Why is this object like the other?" we understand that some out-of-the-way and accidental resemblance is asked for, some not very close analogy, that provokes amusement but not belief; in many cases the resemblance is in the name only and degenerates into a pun. In such exercises of fancy we are employing the same faculties that our ancestors used in arriving at the customs and beliefs that we have been considering. The laws governing the progress of industrial arts, of mechanical inventions and social institutions seem thus to find equally ready application to the evolution of habits and customs in the mental world. From another, and that also a comparative anthropological point of view, the natural history of analogy illustrates, though imperfectly, the evolutionary bond that unites the development of the race from primitive culture to civilization, from infantile helplessness to adult power, and again the dissolution of these processes in disease or their atavistic retention in less progressive strata of society. Significant, even though sporadic, parallelisms have been pointed out in the use of analogy by savages and by children; and far more completely can it be shown that superstitions and pseudo-sciences, folk-lore traditions and popular beliefs show the survival of these same analogical habits of mind, which may be viewed in part as reversions to outgrown conditions of thought, in part as the cropping out, in pathological form, of retarding tendencies which the course of evolution may have repressed but not wholly destroyed. For there is hardly a form of modern superstition, there is hardly a custom sanctioned by the unwritten tradition of the people, but what can be closely duplicated among the customs and beliefs of the untutored savage.