resents to Japanese are outweighed by the differences; and, though
it may ultimately prove to fall into a north-east Asiatic group of
languages, this is so far from being made out that it is safest for the
present to treat both race and language as isolated. Inasmuch as the
little civilisation now possessed by the Ainos has in great measure been
learnt from the Japanese, it is natural that their modern language
should have picked up numbers of Japanese words, from the name of kamui
which they give to their gods, down to the rice-beer or sake in which
they seek continual drunkenness, now their main source of enjoyment. One
purpose which their language serves is to prove how widely they once
spread over the country now Japan, where place-names alone remain to
indicate a former Aino population. Some of these are unmistakeably Aino,
as Yamashiro, which must have meant "land of chestnut trees," and
Shikyu, "place of rushes." Others, if interpreted as Japanese, have a
far-fetched sense, as, for instance, the villages of Mennai and Tonami,
which, if treated as Japanese, would signify "inside permission" and
"hares in a row"; whereas, if taken to be originally Aino they may bear
the reasonable sense of "bad stream" and "stream from the lake." The
inference from records and local names, worked out with great care by
Professor Chamberlain, is "that the Ainos were truly the predecessors of
the Japanese all over the Archipelago. The dawn of history shows them
to us living far to the south and west of their present haunts; and ever
since then, century by century, we see them retreating eastwards and
northwards, as steadily as the American Indian has retreated westwards
under the pressure of the colonists from Europe."

As with their language, so with their folk-lore, which largely shows
itself adopted from the Japanese. In the present collection the stories
of the Salmon-king (xxxiv.), the Island of Women (xxxiii.), and others,
are based on episodes of Japanese tales, sometimes belonging to
world-wide cycles of myth, as in the theme of the mortal who eats the
deadly food of Hades (xxxv.), which has its typical example in the story
of Persephone. On reading the short but curious tale (xvi.), How it was
settled who should rule the World, one sees at once that the cunning
Fox-god has come in from the well-known fox mythology of Japan; and as
to the very clever mythic episode of looking for the sunrise in the
west, I find, on inquiry of