the gods to whom the gift was offered, and who would surely reward the blasphemer for his sin by illness, accident, loss, or death. As soon as the Spaniards had occupied the Ladrones--afterward named the Marianas, in honor of Maria Anna, queen of Philip IV. of Spain--they proceeded to slaughter the natives. In seventy years they had slain with sword, rack, toil, grief, and new diseases about fifty thousand people, reducing the populace to eighteen hundred. Of this aboriginal race, the Chamorros, nearly all have perished. In their original estate these were the most advanced of the Pacific islanders; they had more arts, more refinement, more kindliness, and more morality than the others. Under an age of oppression and abuse they naturally deteriorated, and have cared little to advantage themselves by the few schools and chapels that the Spaniards established in Guam and thereabout. It may be that the Chamorros shared with the people of the Carolines in the suffering caused by the great irruption of savages from the south under Icho-Kalakal. These warriors, in their wooden navies, destroyed the great tombs and temples because they had been raised to other gods than their own, slew the defenders of the temples, and broke up the old civilization, passing from island to island, and continuing their waste and murder. It was a raid of Goths and Vandals, and the effect of it was lasting. In Ponape it is said that the great structures they overthrew are haunted, and people thereabout will not eat a certain fresh-water fish of a blue color, because the king, Chauteleur, flying before Icho-Kalakal, fell into Chapalap River and was changed by the gods into one of these fish. Old Beliefs of the Filipinos Respecting their myths the Filipinos differ in little from other human families whose civilization is incomplete. They had in former times the same tendency to create gods and spirits for particular hills, woods, seas, and lakes, to endow the brutes with human qualities, to symbolize in the deeds of men and animals the phenomena of the heavens. Even now the Monteses tell of a tree that folds its limbs around the trunk of another and hugs it to death, the tree thus killed rotting and leaving a tube of tightly laced branches in which are creatures that bleed through the bark at a sword-thrust or an ax-cut. These creatures are mischievously alleged to be Spaniards. The Tagalogs believe in Tic-Balan, an evil spirit who inhabits fig-trees, but is kept off by wearing a certain herb, and in a female spirit of the woods, Azuan, who is kept away from the house in times of domestic anxiety by the husband, who mounts to the roof and keeps up a disturbance for some hours.