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From the introductory. THE mental concepts of a barbaric race must ever possess an element of interest to the ethnographer, and in studying those of the Maori folk we encounter much evidence to show that they had evolved a belief in many singular abstractions. This is not an uncommon feature in connection with barbaric peoples, such as those of Indonesia and Farther India, and the old-time peoples of Asia. A highly noteworthy. characteristic of such races is the fact that they often assigned a greater number of spiritual potentiae to man than do more highly civilized people. Including both mental and spiritual potentiae, we find that some peoples of antiquity believed in the existence of as many as a dozen. Among ourselves these are reduced to three viz., spirit, soul, and mind. Thus the lot of people of the higher culture-plane, when brought into contact with those of an inferior grade, is not to cultivate their sense of the abstract, but to curb it. In order to anticipate any objection that may be made concerning the indefinite nature of barbaric conceptions of the spiritual nature of man, it may here be said that our own definition of such nature is by no means too clear. This fact was brought home to me some years ago, when I collected from a number of ministers of divers sects their definitions of the terms spirit and soul. These explanations by no means agreed, though emanating from persons who should assuredly be experts in such matters. Annandale tells us that the soul is the spiritual and immortal part in man, the immaterial spirit which inhabits the body, the moral and emotional part of man's nature, the seat of the sentiments or feelings, the animating or essential part, the vital principle....

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