nd the same tale may be the source of Perrault's
_Sleeping Beauty_, also of a _Greek myth_, and also of an _old tale of
illiterate peasantry_. This was the opinion held by Lang, who said,
"For the roots of stories, we must look, not in the clouds but upon
the earth, not in the various aspects of nature but in the daily
occurrences and surroundings, in the current opinions and ideas of
savage life."

In the savage _Maerchen_ of to-day, the ideas and incidents are the
inevitable result of the mental habits and beliefs of savages. We gain
an idea of the savage mind through Leviticus, in the Bible, through
Herodotus, Greek and Roman geographers, Aristotle, Plutarch, Pliny,
etc., through voyagers, missionaries, and travelers, and through
present savage peoples. Savage existence is based on two great
institutions:--

(a) The division of society into clans.--Marriage laws depend on the
conception that these clans descend from certain plants, animals, or
inorganic objects. There was the belief in human descent from animals
and kinship and personal intercourse with them.

(b) Belief in magic and medicine-men, which resulted in powers of
metamorphosis, the effect of incantation, and communion with the
dead.--To the savage all nature was animated, all things were persons.
The leading ideas of savage peoples have already been referred to in
the list of motifs which appear in the different fairy tales, as given
by Lang, mentioned under the "Preparation of the Teacher," in _The
Telling of the Tale_.

II. Fairy tales are myths of Sun, Dawn, Thunder, Rain, etc.

This is sometimes called the Sun-Myth Theory or the Aryan Theory, and
it is the one advocated by Max Mueller and by Grimm.

The fairy tales were primitive man's experience with nature in days
when he could not distinguish between nature and his own personality,
when there was no supernatural because everything was endowed with a
personal life. They were the poetic fancies of light and dark, cloud
and rain, day and night; and underneath them were the same fanciful
meanings. These became changed by time, circumstances in different
countries, and the fancy of the tellers, so that they became sunny and
many-colored in the South, sterner and wilder in the North, and more
home-like in the Middle and West. To the Bushmen the wind was a bird,
and to the Egyptian fire was a living beast. Even _The Song of
Six-Pence_ has been explained as a nature-myth, the pie being the
ea