Yata-garasu. The Chinese characters used here mean "The crow with the head eight feet long." But this is a case where we must put aside the Chinese characters, and attend solely to the Japanese word which they are meant to represent. This is undoubtedly yata-garasu, as we know from the "Kojiki" and from the traditional Kana rendering. Much has been written about this bird by Motowori and other Shinto scholars, which is, I venture to think, wholly wide of the mark. The clue to its meaning is afforded by the "Wamio-sho ," a Chinese-Japanese vocabulary of the tenth century, which says, on the authority of the "Shiki," still more ancient commentaries on the "Nihongi," that the Yang-wu or Sun-crow is in Japanese yata-garasu. The Yang-wu is a bird with three claws, and of a red colour, which, according to Chinese myth, inhabits the sun. It we accept this identification, the meaning ogf the epithet yata becomes clear. It means eight hands, or, as ya in ancient Japanese meant also many or several, many hands, a sufficiently accurate description for popular myth of the Yang-wu with its three claws. The late M. Terrien de La-Couperie, in his "Wesdtern Origin of Early Chinese Civilization," says that "the allusion to the three-legged crow supposed to roost in the sun occurs in the "Li Sao" of Kiu-yuen, the poet of Ts'u, 314 B.C. in China. A three-legged bird in various forms was figured on coins of Pamphylia and Lycia of older times. Comte Goblet d'Alviella has reproduced some of them in his interesting work on "la Migration des Symboles," 1891, p. 222. See a paper on the Hi no maru in "T.A.S.J.," Vol. XXII., p. 27, and Ch. K., p. 136. The guidance of conquerors or colonists to their destination by a supernatural bird or beast is a familiar feature of old-world story. See Lang, "Custom and Myth," II, 71.