“Few who will give their minds to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it ridiculous.... Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance.”—Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, New York, 1874, vol. i. p. 21. The object of the present monograph is to arrange in a form for easy reference such allusions as have come under the author’s notice bearing upon the use of human or animal ordure or urine or articles apparently intended as substitutes for them, whether in rites of a clearly religious or “medicine” type, or in those which, while not pronouncedly such, have about them suggestions that they may be survivals of former urine dances or ur-orgies among tribes and peoples from whose later mode of life and thought they have been eliminated. The difficulties surrounding the elucidation of this topic will no doubt occur to every student of anthropology or ethnology. The rites and practices herein spoken of are to be found only in communities isolated from the world, and are such as even savages would shrink from revealing unnecessarily to strangers; while, too frequently, observers of intelligence have failed to improve opportunities for noting the existence of rites of this nature, or else, restrained by a false modesty, have clothed their remarks in vague and indefinite phraseology, forgetting that as a physician, to be skilful, must study his patients both in sickness and in health, so the anthropologist must study man, not alone wherein he reflects the grandeur of his Maker, but likewise in his grosser and more animal propensities. When the first edition of “Notes and Memoranda,” etc., upon this subject, was distributed by the Smithsonian Institution, the author was prepared to believe that, to a large and constantly increasing circle of scholars, the subject would prove of unusual interest, and that, to repeat the words of a great emperor, as quoted by a greater philosopher, all belonging to primitive man was worthy of scrutiny and examination by those who would become familiar with his history and evolution. “We ought to be able to say, like the Emperor Maximilian, ‘homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ or translating his words literally, ‘I am a man; nothing pertaining to man I deem foreign to myself.’”—(Max Müller, “Chips from a German Workshop.” Maximilian was using a citation from Terence.)