rse
races.

We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented the
same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread
from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story, once
invented, has drifted all round the world. If the last theory be
approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell found lately in
the Polish bone-cave, {102a} or like the Egyptian beads discovered in the
soil of Dahomey. The story will have been carried hither and thither, in
the remotest times, to the remotest shores, by traders, by slaves, by
captives in war, or by women torn from their own tribe and forcibly
settled as wives among alien peoples.

Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers and
grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of
exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same
stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must have
been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as often
happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably bring the
hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange speech. By
all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may account for the
diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales like the central
arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason. {102b}

APOLLO AND THE MOUSE.

Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered the
darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with a
mouse? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest calls on
him in the 'Iliad' (i. 39), might be rendered 'Mouse Apollo,' or 'Apollo,
Lord of Mice.' As we shall see later, mice lived beneath the altar, and
were fed in the holy of holies of the god, and an image of a mouse was
placed beside or upon his sacred tripod. The ancients were puzzled by
these things, and, as will be shown, accounted for them by
'mouse-stories,' [Greek], so styled by Eustathius, the mediaeval
interpreter of Homer. Following our usual method, let us ask whether
similar phenomena occur elsewhere, in countries where they are
intelligible. Did insignificant animals elsewhere receive worship: were
their effigies elsewhere placed in the temples of a purer creed? We find
answers in the history of Peruvian religion.

After the Spanish conquest of Peru, one of the European adventurers, Don
Garcilasso de la V