Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/194

176 the acquisition of Toda folklore which might otherwise have remained undiscovered and no small amount of my collection of Toda legends is due to clues given in the few prayers I was able to collect. If I had had time and persuasive power to collect the whole stock of the formulae of the Toda dairies, I believe that I should have been put on the track of a collection of Toda folklore of which the legends I have actually succeeded in collecting would form an insignificant proportion.

Another of the interesting features of the formula is the change which has taken place and may still be going on in the relative importance of the two parts of the prayer. The first portion consisting of the kwarzam is now the most important part, while the words which seem to be of the nature of actual prayer are now often slurred over or may even be largely omitted. It seemed to me that the prayer proper was even now still undergoing a process of atrophy, and if it should disappear we should have only the series of kwarzam—a form of words which no one could recognise as prayer.

A further point of interest is that the Toda prayer suggests a possible explanation of some cases of meaningless religious formulae. It is a familiar fact to students of comparative religion that the words used in religious formulae are sometimes entirely meaningless to those who use them. The commonly accepted explanation is that the words of the formulae belong to a forgotten language. We know that change or great modification of language is a very common phenomenon among primitive peoples, and it is supposed that the ancient language, or the more ancient form of the language, persists in connection with religious observances long, after it has become entirely obsolete in ordinary life. There is little doubt that this is the correct explanation in many cases, but the nature of the Toda kwarzam suggests a possible alternative. There is little doubt that the Todas are now forgetting much of their mythology, or rather that their older legends are being