568 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in certain Algonquin tales, to mischief of a more or less harmless char- 

 acter, was a being of lofty nature, and, save for the ruder surroundings 

 of his life, a personage quite as imposing as Arthur himself. Indeed, 

 in the conception of each as a power for good — and this is the real 

 essence of their natures — there is little, if any, difference. 



The modern world can not but miss the drift of these stories, for 

 the mind that conceived them belonged to the youth of a race. Men 

 of to-day have so far forgotten this period of racial childhood (as they 

 have forgotten their own individual childhood), have so far put behind 

 them the childish things, that they largely fail to grasp the real mean- 

 ing of these tales. It was the earliest glimmer of that racial self- 

 consciousness that in after times found expression in self-narrated 

 history and in religious belief. The type or mode of thought was the 

 same in all races when they reached this crisis in their psychic develop- 

 ment — a realization of kinship with the powers of earth and air, with 

 the phenomena of nature, and with the life of animals and plants. 

 Child-like efforts to account for the origin of things gave rise to those 

 strange creation myths that exist as primitive conceptions in the his- 

 tory of every race and people. Delusions of judgment undoubtedly 

 played a large part in the myth-making faculty of primitive men. 

 They verily believed that they saw and heard strange forms, unem- 

 bodied voices. They were overawed in the presence of elemental 

 forces and, child-like, they saw in all the lineaments of nature myste- 

 rious powers, potent for good or evil. The sights and sounds of nature 

 and the ways of animals were interpreted by them in terms of their own 

 mode of thought. To the phenomena of cause and effect, to the hap- 

 hazard circumstances of their own lives and those of their fellowmen — 

 fortuitous and unfortuitous happenings — and to dreams, they imputed 

 the agency of superhuman powers or magic. To this latter class of 

 phenomena — dreams — we may attribute much of that curious recital 

 of visits to the underworld. In the Eed Swan, for example, the hero 

 of the tale, after his return to his native village, journeys to the abodes 

 of the dead, where he holds converse with the chief of the departed 

 buffaloes. One can not help but be impressed, in reading this portion 

 of the tale, with its resemblance to the visit of Odysseus to Hades. 



These myths and folk stories have drifted down to us out of so 

 remote a past that the period which they depict in the history of any 

 group of peoples can never be certainly known. More than likely they 

 are the embodiment of a slow subliminal growth that began with men of 

 paleolithic culture in various parts of the earth as a result of the im- 

 press of their surroundings. At a later period, possibly in a neolithic 

 stage of culture, as in aboriginal America, this body of impressions 

 crystallized into the form of the myth and the folk tale. Homer de- 

 picts the Bronze Age, which was later than that of stone, and the Celtic 

 tales are probably of this period also, but there are no means of knowing 

 where the germ of any myth or story had its origin, for much new 



