ore erotic or a more obscene
character. In the Irish _Book of Leinster_ (written down
somewhere about the twelfth century, but containing material of
very much older date) we are told how a number of princesses in
Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulster Kings, resolved to find out
which of them could by urinating on it melt a snow pillar which
the men had made, the woman who succeeded to be regarded as the
best among them. None of them succeeded, and they sent for
Derbforgaill, who was in love with Cuchullain, and she was able
to melt the pillar; whereupon the other women, jealous of the
superiority she had thus shown, tore out her eyes. (Zimmer,
"Keltische Beitraege," _Zeitschrift fuer Deutsche Alterthum_, vol.
xxxii, Heft II, pp. 216-219.) Rhys considers that Derbforgaill
was really a goddess of dawn and dusk, "the drop glistening in
the sun's rays," as indicated by her name, which means a drop or
tear. (J. Rhys, _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as
Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_, p. 466.) It is interesting to
compare the legend of Derbforgaill with a somewhat more modern
Picardy folk-lore _conte_ which is clearly analogous but no
longer seems to show any mythologic element, "La Princesse qui
pisse par dessus les Meules." This princess had a habit of
urinating over hay-cocks; the king, her father, in order to break
her of the habit, offered her in marriage to anyone who could
make a hay-cock so high that she could not urinate over it. The
young men came, but the princess would merely laugh and at once
achieve the task. At last there came a young man who argued with
himself that she would not be able to perform this feat after she
had lost her virginity. He therefore seduced her first and she
then failed ignobly, merely wetting her stockings. Accordingly,
she became his bride. (Kryptadia, vol. i. p. 333.) Such legends,
which have lost any mythologic elements they may originally have
possessed and have become merely _contes_, are not uncommon in
the folk-lore of many countries. But in their earlier more
religious forms and in their later more obscene forms, they alike
bear witness to the large place which scatalogic conceptions play
in the primitive mind.

It is a notable fact in evidence of the close and seemingly normal
association with the sexual impulse of the scata