t correct to compare Greek,
Slavonic, Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts,
and Hindoos all speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold
it correct to compare Chaldaean and Greek myths, because the Greeks and
the Chaldaeans were brought into contact through the Phoenicians, and
by other intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same
mythologists will vow that it is unscientific to compare a Maori or a
Hottentot or an Eskimo myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and
Eskimo and Hottentots do not speak languages akin to that of Greece,
nor can we show that the ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and
Eskimo were ever in contact with each other in historical times.

Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture
to compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the
myths of the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a product
of the early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of
the outer world, the student of folklore thinks that differences of
race do not much affect the early mythopoeic faculty. He will not be
surprised if Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.

In each case, he holds, all the circumstances of the case must be
examined and considered. For instance, when the Australians tell a
myth about the Pleiades very like the Greek myth of the Pleiades, we
must ask a number of questions. Is the Australian version authentic?
Can the people who told it have heard it from a European? If these
questions are answered so as to make it apparent that the Australian
Pleiad myth is of genuine native origin, we need not fly to the
conclusion that the Australians are a lost and forlorn branch of the
Aryan race. Two other hypotheses present themselves. First, the human
species is of unknown antiquity. In the moderate allowance of 250,000
years, there is time for stories to have wandered all round the
world, as the Aggry beads of Ashanti have probably crossed the
continent from Egypt, as the Asiatic jade (if Asiatic it be) has
arrived in Swiss lake-dwellings, as an African trade-cowry is said to
have been found in a Cornish barrow, as an Indian Ocean shell has been
discovered in a prehistoric bone-cave in Poland. This slow filtration
of tales is not absolutely out of the question. Two causes would
especially help to transmit myths. The first is slavery and
slave-stealing, the second is the habit of capturing brides from