bamboo, and, tying a noose at one end, he fans it down the child’s arm, saying: ‘_Fan away ill luck, fan away ill success:_ _Fan away inability, fan away unskilfulness:_ _Fan away slow growth, fan away difficulty of growth:_ _Fan away stuntedness, fan away puniness:_ _Fan away drowsiness, fan away stupidity:_ _Fan away debasedness, fan away wretchedness:_ _Fan away the whole completely._’ “The Elder now changes his motion and fans up the child’s arm, saying: ‘_Fan on power, fan on influence:_ _Fan on the paddy bin, fan on the paddy barn:_ _Fan on followers, fan on dependants:_ _Fan on good things, fan on appropriate things._’ ”(39) (M7) Thus in some of the foregoing instances the employment of the winnowing-fan may have been suggested by the proper use of the implement as a means of separating the corn from the chaff, the same operation being extended by analogy to rid men of evils of various sorts which would otherwise adhere to them like husks to the grain. It was in this way that the ancients explained the use of the winnowing-fan in the mysteries.(40) But one motive, and perhaps the original one, for setting a newborn child in a winnowing-fan and surrounding it with corn was probably the wish to communicate to the infant, on the principle of sympathetic magic, the fertility and especially the power of growth possessed by the grain. This was in substance the explanation which W. Mannhardt gave of the custom.(41) He rightly insisted on the analogy which many peoples, and in particular the ancient Greeks, have traced between the sowing of seed and the begetting of children,(42) and he confirmed his view of the function of the winnowing-fan in these ceremonies by aptly comparing a German custom of sowing barley or flax seed over weakly and stunted children in the belief that this will make them grow with the growth of the barley or the flax.(43) An Esthonian mode of accomplishing the same object is to set the child in the middle of a plot of ground where a sower is sowing hemp and to leave the little one there till the sowing is finished; after that they imagine that the child will shoot up in stature like the hemp which has just been sown.(44)