abiding monument of primeval culture. This framework, the all but universal scheme of reckoning by fives, tens, and twenties, shows that the childish and savage practice of counting on fingers and toes lies at the foundation of our arithmetical science. Ten seems the most convenient arithmetical basis offered by systems founded on handcounting, but twelve would have been better, and duodecimal arithmetic is in fact a protest against the less convenient decimal arithmetic in ordinary use. The case is the not uncommon one of high civilization bearing evident traces of the rudeness of its origin in ancient barbaric life.

CHAPTER VIII.

MYTHOLOGY.

Mythic Fancy based, like other thought, on Experience-Mythology affords evidence for studying laws of Imagination-Change in public opinion as to credibility of Myths - Myths rationalized into Allegory and HistoryEthnological import and treatment of Myth-Myth to be studied in actual existence and growth among modern savages and barbarians-Original sources of Myth-Early doctrines of general animation of Nature-Personification of Sun, Moon, and Stars; Water-spout, Sand-pillar, Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence-Analogy worked into Myth and Metaphor--Myths of Rain, Thunder, &c.-Effect of Language in formation of MythMaterial Personification primary, Verbal Personification secondaryGrammatical Gender, male and female, animate and inanimate, in relation to Myth-Proper Names of objects in relation to Myth-Mental State proper to promote mythic imagination - Doctrine of Werewolves Phantasy and Fancy.

AMONG those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an almost boundless creative power of the human imagination. The superficial student, mazed in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to have no reason in nature nor pattern in this material world, at first concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the tale-teller, and the seer. But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped, and built over, and peopled. Backward from our own times, the course of mental history may be traced

VOL. I.

T

through the changes wrought by modern schools of thought and fancy, upon an intellectual inheritance handed down to them from earlier generations. And through remoter periods, as we recede more nearly towards primitive conditions of our race, the threads which connect new thought with old do not always vanish from our sight. It is in large measure possible to follow them as clues leading back to that actual experience of nature and life, which is the ultimate source of human fancy. What Matthew Arnold has written of Man's thoughts as he floats along the River of Time, is most true of his mythic imagination :—

"As is the world on the banks

So is the mind of the man.

Only the tract where he sails

He wots of only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his."

Impressions thus received the mind will modify and work upon, transmitting the products to other minds in shapes that often seem new, strange, and arbitrary, but which yet result from processes familiar to our experience, and to be found at work in our own individual consciousness. The office of our thought is to develope, to combine, and to derive, rather than to create; and the consistent laws it works by are to be discerned even in the unsubstantial structures of the imagination. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, there is to be recognized a sequence from cause to effect, a sequence intelligible, definite, and where knowledge reaches the needful exactness, even calculable.

There is perhaps no better subject-matter through which to study the processes of the imagination, than the wellmarked incidents of mythical story, ranging as they do through every known period of civilization, and through all the physically varied tribes of mankind. Here Maui, the New Zealand Sun-god, fishing up the island with his enchanted hook from the bottom of the sea, will take his place in company with the Indian Vishnu, diving to the depth of the

ocean in his avatar of the Boar, to bring up the submerged earth on his monstrous tusks; and here Baiame the creator, whose voice the rude Australians hear in the rolling thunder, will sit throned by the side of Olympian Zeus himself. Starting with the bold rough nature-myths into which the savage moulds the lessons he has learnt from his childlike contemplation of the universe, the ethnographer can follow these rude fictions up into times when they were shaped and incorporated into complex mythologic systems, gracefully artistic in Greece, stiff and monstrous in Mexico, swelled into bombastic exaggeration in Buddhist Asia. He can watch how the mythology of classic Europe, once so true to nature and so quick with her ceaseless life, fell among the commentators to be plastered with allegory or euhemerized into dull sham history. At last, in the midst of modern civilization, he finds the classic volumes studied rather for their manner than for their matter, or mainly valued for their antiquarian evidence of the thoughts of former times; while relics of structures reared with skill and strength by the myth-makers of the past must now be sought in scraps of nursery folk-lore, in vulgar superstitions and old dying legends, in thoughts and allusions carried on from ancient days by the perennial stream of poetry and romance, in fragments of old opinion which still hold an inherited rank gained in past ages of intellectual history. But this turning of mythology to account as a means of tracing the history of laws of mind, is a branch of science scarcely discovered till the present century. Before entering here on some researches belonging to it, there will be advantage in glancing at the views of older mythologists, to show through what changes their study has at length reached a condition in which it has a scientific value.

It is a momentous phase of the education of mankind, when the regularity of nature has so imprinted itself upon men's minds, that they begin to wonder how it is that the ancient legends that they were brought up to hear with such reverent delight, should describe a world so strangely

different from their own. Why, they ask, are the gods and giants and monsters no longer seen to lead their prodigious lives on earth-is it perchance that the course of things is changed since the old days? Thus it seemed to Pausanias the historian, that the wide-grown wickedness of the world had brought it to pass that times were no longer as of old, when Lykaon was turned into a wolf, and Niobe into a stone, when men still sat as guests at table with the gods, or were raised like Herakles to become gods themselves. Up to modern times, the hypothesis of a changed world has more or less availed to remove the difficulty of belief in ancient wonder-tales. Yet though always holding firmly a partial ground, its application was soon limited for these obvious reasons, that it justified falsehood and truth alike with even-handed favour, and utterly broke down that barrier of probability which in some measure has always separated fact from fancy. The Greek mind found other outlets to the problem. In the words of Mr. Grote, the ancient legends were cast back into an undefined past, to take rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic antiquity, gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument. Or they were transformed into shapes more familiar to experience, as when Plutarch, telling the tale of Theseus, begs for indulgent hearers to accept mildly the archaic story, and assures them that he has set himself to purify it by reason, that it may receive the aspect of history. This process of giving fable the aspect of history, this profitless art of transforming untrue impossibilities into untrue possibilities, has been carried on by the ancients, and by the moderns after them, especially according to the two following methods.

Men have for ages been more or less conscious of that great mental district lying between disbelief and belief, where room is found for all mythic interpretation, good or bad. It being admitted that some legend is not the real narrative

Grote, History of Greece,' vol. i. chaps. ix. xi. ; Pausanias viii. 2; Plutarch. Theseus 1.