made out by some one acquainted with the language, otherwise acts may be confused which have really different senses, as where a morsel of food offered as a pious offering to an ancestral ghost may be taken for a sacrifice to appease an angry wood-demon. A people’s idea as to the meaning of their own rites may often be very wrong, but it is always worth while to hear what they think of the purpose of their prayers, sacrifices, purifications, fasts, feasts, and other religious ordinances, which even among savage tribes have been long since stereotyped into traditional systems. Mythology is intimately mixed up with religion, which not only ascribes the events of the world to the action of spirits, demons, or gods, but everywhere individualises many of these beings under personal names, and receives as sacred tradition wonder-tales about them. Thus, to understand the religion of some tribes, we have not only to consider the rude philosophy under which such objects as heaven and earth or sun and moon are regarded as personal beings, whose souls (so to speak) are the heaven-god and earth-god, the sun-god and moon-god; but we have to go on further and collect the religious myths which have grown on to these superhuman beings. The tales which such a people tell of their origin and past history may to some extent include traditions of real events, but mostly they consist of myths, which are also worth collecting, as they often on examination disclose their origin, or part of it. This is seen, for instance, in the South Sea Island tale of the god Maui, whose death, when he plunged into the body of his great ancestress the Night, is an obvious myth of the sunset. The best advice as to native mythology is to write down all promising native stories, leaving it to future examination to decide which are worth publishing. The native names of personages occurring in such stories should be inquired into, as they sometimes carry in themselves the explanation of the story itself, like the name of Great-Woman-Night in the Polynesian myth just referred to. Riddles are sometimes interesting, as being myths with an explanation attached, like the Greek riddle of the twelve black and twelve white horses that draw the chariot of the day. It is not too much to say that everything which a people thinks worth remembering as a popular tradition, and all the more if it is fixed in rhyme or verse, is worth notice, as likely to contain something of historical value. That it may not be historically true is beside the question, for the poetic fictions of a tribe often throw more light on their history than their recollections of petty chiefs who quarrelled fifty years ago. The myths may record some old custom or keep up some old word that has died out of ordinary talk, or the very fact of their containing a story known elsewhere in the world may give a clue to forgotten intercourse by which it was learnt.