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 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