62 



The Solar Theory of Myths. 



goal, the clue failed. Greek and Latin, Sanscrit and 

 Gothic melted into Indo-European ; an almost equally 

 numerous family grouped themselves as Semitic ; still 

 others as Turanian or rival stocks, but that was all. They 

 stood distinct, and if their paths did converge as they 

 receded, they did this too slowly to seem aught but parallel. 

 But for the new emergency are found new resources. 

 From the records left him the historian had traced the course 

 of individuals ; by the language which he spoke, he had 

 marked the path of nations, and now, back of the written 

 language, behind the spoken, did he find as guide the 

 thoughts of humanity, its childlike explanation of the 

 course of nature, its crude conceptions of an all-ruling 

 divinity, l^o longer were Bel and Osiris and Zeus, Isis, 

 Ashtaroth and Here the mere children of fable ; Apollo no 

 longer disclosed the future but unlocked the arcaua of the 

 past ; the queen of the fairies left the children she had loved 

 so long ; and touched with her wand the scholar ; Tom 

 Thumb was found a true porphyrogenite, and Cinderella 

 the princess of a royal line, whose chaste splendor' made 

 cheap the courts of Susa, and before whose antiquity the 

 house of the Pharaohs was an infant. 



For researches into the laws, philosophy, fable and re- 

 ligions of different peoples showed that there existed be- 

 tween them a marvelous accord. This was found most 

 marked in such respects as later civilization had least 

 affected them ; there was noted a strange parallelism be- 

 tween the religions of different races, a peculiar accord in 

 the plan of their epic poetry, a wonderful agreement in the 

 adventures of the heroes of their nursery tales ; their 

 theology, literature and story were seen to be but different 

 manifestations of the same universal type, and — precedent 

 to law and philosophy — to be the cr^^stalized speculations of 

 a baby world. ^ N'ot merely are general features the same, 



^ Fiske — MytJis and Myth Makers, chap. I : Origin of Folk Lore. Glad- 

 stone — Juvenilis Mundi, chap. VIII : Athene and Apollo. Tylor — Pri- 

 mitive Culture, vol. I, chap. Ill : Survival in Culture, and chap, VIII : My- 

 thology. BeQxLbeTn&tiB — Mitologia Yedica,^^. 197 and 234. 



