addressed to nobody in particular, which the sorcerer mutters while he is performing his magical rites.(335) It is true, that here the distinction is drawn between narratives and requests rather than between narratives and commands; but the difference of a request from a command, though great in theory, may be very slight in practice; so that prayer and spell, in the ordinary sense of the words, may melt into each other almost imperceptibly. Even the priest or the enchanter who utters the one may be hardly conscious of the hairbreadth that divides it from the other. In regard to narrative spells, it seems probable that they have been used much more extensively among mankind than the evidence at our disposal permits us positively to affirm; in particular we may conjecture that many ancient narratives, which we have been accustomed to treat as mere myths, used to be regularly recited in magical rites as spells for the purpose of actually producing events like those which they describe. (M79) The use of the bull-roarer to quicken the fruits of the earth is not peculiar to the Yabim. On the other side of New Guinea the instrument is employed for the same purpose by the natives of Kiwai, an island at the mouth of the Fly River. They think that by whirling bull-roarers they produce good crops of yams, sweet potatoes, and bananas; and in accordance with this belief they call the implement “the mother of yams.”(336) Similarly in Mabuiag, an island in Torres Straits, the bull-roarer is looked upon as an instrument that can be used to promote the growth of garden produce, such as yams and sweet potatoes; certain spirits were supposed to march round the gardens at night swinging bull-roarers for this purpose.(337) Indeed a fertilising or prolific virtue appears to be attributed to the instrument by savages who are totally ignorant of agriculture. Thus among the Dieri of central Australia, when a young man had undergone the painful initiatory ceremony of having a number of gashes cut in his back, he used to be given a bull-roarer, whereupon it was believed that he became inspired by the spirits of the men of old, and that by whirling it, when he went in search of game before his wounds were healed, he had power to cause a good harvest of lizards, snakes, and other reptiles. On the other hand, the Dieri thought that if a woman were to see a bull-roarer that had been used at the initiatory ceremonies and to learn its secret, the tribe would ever afterwards be destitute of snakes, lizards, and other such food.(338) It may very well be that a similar power to fertilise or multiply edible plants and animals has been ascribed to the bull-roarer by many other peoples who employ the implement in their mysteries.