THE STORIES 29 



been made to prove that it has travelled from one 

 centre and thence become diffused throughout the 

 earth. Such efforts are generally connected with a 

 desire to uphold the truth of divine revelation, and 

 consequently to trace the tale to a corrupted form of 

 Hebrew-Christian tradition. They are doomed to 

 failure. The myth is too far-spread what is more 

 important, it is much too deeply rooted in the savage 

 belief and practices of both hemispheres to be 

 accounted for by the plain and easy theory of borrowing. 

 This I shall proceed to show in the next chapter. 





