constellations into which they map out the heavens. This likening stars and star-groups to animals and other objects is almost universal among mankind. Savages like the Australians still make fanciful stories about them, as that Castor and Pollux are two native hunters, who pursue the kangaroo (Capella) and kill him at the beginning of the hot season. Such stories enable us to understand the myths of the Classical Dictionary, while modern astronomers keep up the old constellations as a convenient mode of mapping out the sky. As to maps of the earth, even low tribes have some notion of their principle, and can roughly draw the chart of their own district, which they should be encouraged to do. Native knowledge of natural history differs from much of their rude science in its quality, often being of great positive value. The savage or barbarian hunter knows the animals of his own region and their habits with remarkable accuracy, and inherited experience has taught him that certain plants have industrial and medicinal uses. Thus, in South America the Europeans learnt the use of India-rubber or caoutchouc, which the native tribes were accustomed to make into vessels and playing-balls, and of the Peruvian bark or cinchona, which was already given to patients in fever. Here a few words may be said of magic, which, though so utterly futile in practice, is a sort of early and unsuccessful attempt at science. It is easy, on looking into the proceedings of the magician, to see that many of them are merely attempts to work by false analogy or deceptive association of ideas. The attempt to hurt or kill a person by cutting or piercing a rude picture or image representing him, which is met with in all the four quarters of the globe, is a perfect example of the way in which sorcerers mistake mere association of ideas for real cause and effect. Examined from this point of view, it will be found that a large proportion of the magic rites of the world will explain their own meaning. It is true that this is not the only principle at work in the magician’s mind; for instance, he seems to reason in a loose way that any extraordinary thing will produce any extraordinary effect, so that the peculiar stones and bits of wood which we should call curiosities become to the African sorcerer powerful fetishes. It will often be noticed that arts belonging to the systematic magic of the civilised world, which has its source in Babylon and Egypt, have found their way into distant lands more readily indeed than useful knowledge, so that they may even be met with among barbaric tribes. Thus it has lately been pointed out that the system of lucky and unlucky days, which led the natives in Madagascar to kill many infants as of inauspicious birth, is adopted from Arabic magic, and it is to be expected that many other magical arts, if their formulas are accurately described, may in like manner be traced to their origin.