(M76) Thus with these New Guinea people the playing of certain games and the recital of certain legends are alike magical in their intention; they are charms practised to ensure good crops. Both sets of charms appear to be based on the principles of sympathetic magic. In playing the games the players perform acts which are supposed to mimic or at all events to stimulate the corresponding processes in the plants: by swinging high in the air they make the plants grow high; by playing cat’s cradle they cause the leaves of the yams to spread and the stalks to intertwine, even as the players spread their hands and twine the string about their fingers; by spinning fruits they make the taro plants to turn and broaden; and by spearing the taro leaves they induce the plants to set tubers.(328) In telling the legends the story-tellers mention the names of the powerful beings who first created the fruits of the earth, and the mere mention of their names avails, on the principle of the magical equivalence of names and persons or things, to reproduce the effect.(329) The recitation of tales as a charm to promote the growth of the crops is not peculiar to the Kai. It is practised also by the Bakaua, another tribe of German New Guinea, who inhabit the coast of Huon Gulf, not far from the Kai. These people tell stories in the evening at the time when the yams and taro are ripe, and the stories always end with a prayer to the ancestral spirits, invoked under various more or less figurative designations, such as “a man” or “a cricket,” that they would be pleased to cause countless shoots to sprout, the great tubers to swell, the sugar-cane to thrive, and the bananas to hang in long clusters. “From this we see,” says the missionary who reports the custom, “that the object of telling the stories is to prove to the ancestors, whose spirits are believed to be present at the recitation of the tales which they either invented or inherited, that people always remember them; for which reason they ought to be favourable to their descendants, and above all to bestow their blessings on the shoots which are ready to be planted or on the plants already in the ground.” As the story-teller utters the prayer, he looks towards the house in which the young shoots ready for planting or the ripe fruits are deposited.(330)