Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/108

 96 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

efforts to make these rites appear logical to themselves in the light of their present needs. Rites are thus handed down from a remote antiquity, but the reasons for these rites die a natural death because they fail to satisfy advancing culture. Each new generation of priests modifies the explanations of its predecessor until the rite is abandoned.

This immutability of the ceremony gives it a great value as a means of studying the religious sentiment of which it is one mode of expression.

J. Walter Fewkes,

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