Franz Boas chose as his particular field of study the sea-oriented cultures of the Pacific Northwest. In his lifetime as a working anthropologist he produced, according to Helen Codere, more than 10,000 printed pages about that region. He penned his last statement on folklore in 1938, and his last book was entitled Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1955). Commenting on this massive body of material, Melville Jacobs said that for twenty years and more it has been comparable to a storeroom filled with "incomprehensible miscellanea." Incomprehensible, he suggested, because the collecting, translating, classifying, and cross-referencing of Indian myths never gave way to a theoretical statement of meaningful content. Essentially Boas arrived at the conclusion that this mythology of the Northwest had no systematic order and that it must be understood simply as a species of literature which reflected the concerns of the village and the culture. Other anthropologists and other thinkers have since revisited this "storeroom" to peruse and reshuffle the seemingly disconnected stories again to see if some clue or some meaningful pattern had not been overlooked. From their writings and from the pioneering work of Boas, certain explanatory ideas and useful approaches have emerged, and over a period of time they have come to seem more promising or more basic than others. First, the idea of similarities and differences in myths was a concept that Boas inherited from earlier investigators but also one which he criticized and helped to redirect. Second, the concept of ethnocentrism, or the question of cultural relativity, was an important theoretical point in the writings of Boas. And third, the matter of a language code, or of a sensory language associated with myth, was only dimly glimpsed; the idea was left for others to develop.