Still further difficulties beset the enquirer into the beliefs of the lower culture. On the threshold is that of language. To be sure that you have grasped the real meaning of your savage friend you must be able to talk his language as he talks it himself--and even then you may be mistaken. “When there is no certain medium of communication,” says Bishop Codrington, writing of the Melanesians, “when a native interpreter who speaks a little broken English is employed to ask questions and to return the answers, nothing can be depended on as certain which is received. To be able to use some European word, or word supposed to be English, to describe a native practice or to convey a native belief, is to have an easy means of giving information; and so among the islands ‘plenty devil’ is the description given of a sacred spot, and ‘_tevoro_’ (devil) in Fiji has become the common appellation of the native ghosts or spirits. Supposing, again, that the enquirer is able to communicate pretty freely on ordinary subjects in the language of any island, he will surely find himself baffled when any one of the elder people undertakes to give him information. The vocabulary of ordinary life is almost useless when the region of mysteries and superstitions is approached.”[16.1] {17} The use of the word “devil,” universal in and around Melanesia when speaking in pigeon English of the native mysteries and the objects of the native cult or fear, illustrates one of the pitfalls in the path of the anthropologist. The native ideas do not coincide with ours. The history, the environment, the social and intellectual condition of peoples in the lower culture are as diverse from ours as their geographical situation. Consequently their speech contains no equivalent for many of our words, even of words that seem to us to convey ideas elementary and simple. No Australian language possesses a word which is the exact equivalent of our word “mother.” The word we roughly equate with “mother” includes a host of other women beside her who has given birth to the child. Some of these women we should designate as “aunt,” or as “stepmother”; but many of them stand in no relation of kinship according to our reckoning. Yet they are all addressed and spoken of by the same term as the veritable mother. Kinship, in fact, is counted in the lower culture along lines quite different from ours; and though it is probable that our degrees of kindred have evolved from a rudimentary condition similar to that which we find among savages, we have so far outgrown it that their reckoning is often unintelligible to us, and only a very few of the terms in use among European nations remain to point back to an earlier stage of development. If we have this difficulty in finding equivalents for terms expressive of the simplest relationships of our social life, how much greater must be our difficulty when we come to terms expressive of the mysterious and supersensual relations of man