rank. On the south
side sat the old and most accomplished priests, "whose duty it was to
insist on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient
lore."[200] The American-Indian account, by the Iroquois, of how myths
were told to an ancient chief and an assembly of the people on a
circular open space in a deep forest, wherein was a large wheel-shaped
stone, from beneath which came a voice which told the tale of the
former world, and how the first people became what they are at
present,[201] is in exact accord with this evidence. The priestly
novice among the Indians of British Guiana is taught the traditions of
the tribe, while the medicine man of the Bororo in Brazil has to learn
certain ritual songs and the languages of birds, beasts, and
trees.[202]

I do not want to press the point too far, because evidence is not easy
to get on account of the incomplete fashion in which it has been
collected and presented to the student. The records of native life are
divided off into chapters arranged, not on the basis of native ideas,
but on the basis of civilised ideas, and from this cause we get myth
and belief in different chapters as if they had no connection with
each other; we get myths treated as if they were but the
fancy-begotten amusements of the individual, instead of the serious
ideas of the collective people about the elements of nature to which
they have directed their attention. Mr. J. A. Farrer comes practically
to this correct conclusion,[203] while Mr. Jevons seems to me to have
arrived at the same result in spite of some false intermediate steps,
due to his failure to discriminate between myth and mythology.[204]
Failures of this kind are of almost infinite loss to scientific
research. They stop the results which might flow from the stages
correctly reached, and hide the full significance which arises from
the fact that man's aspirations are always so much in excess of his
accomplished acts. Poetry, philosophy, prayer, worship, are all short
of the ideal; and the question may surely arise whether the actual
accomplishments of man in civilisation, as compared with those of man
in savagery, afford any sort of indication of the distance between
man's accomplishment and his aspiration at any age. If man has never
travelled at one moment of time, or at one definite period of life,
all this distance in thought, it may still be possible to use this
distance between savage and cultured accomplishment as a standa