alien
stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman of a man's own
family. Slaves and captured brides would bring their native legends
among alien peoples.

But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance
(granting that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth.
The object of both myths is to account for the grouping and other
phenomena of the constellations. May not similar explanatory stories
have occurred to the ancestors of the Australians, and to the
ancestors of the Greeks, however remote their home, while they were
still in the savage condition? The best way to investigate this point
is to collect all known savage and civilised stellar myths, and see
what points they have in common. If they all agree in character,
though the Greek tales are full of grace, while those of the
Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may plausibly account
for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the similarity of
flint arrow-heads. The myths, like the arrow-heads, resemble each
other because they were originally framed to meet the same needs out
of the same material. In the case of the arrow-heads, the need was for
something hard, heavy, and sharp--the material was flint. In the case
of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena--the material
(so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all
objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no
metamorphosis appeared impossible.

In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various
peoples will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of
alien families, and have never (so far as history shows us) been in
actual contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or
myth, which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race,
beside the similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found
among savages. A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by
the non-progressive classes in a progressive people. This folklore
represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of
which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be
that the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a
relic surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race
were in the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that
'some sort of genealogy should be established' between the Australian
and the Greek narra