rseries; and she tells them in
words which are phonetically akin to words in Swedish and Gaelic. No
doubt many of these stories might have been devised in a dozen different
places independently of each other; and no doubt many of them have
been transmitted laterally from one people to another; but a careful
examination shows that such cannot have been the case with the great
majority of legends and beliefs. The agreement between two such stories,
for instance, as those of Faithful John and Rama and Luxman is so
close as to make it incredible that they should have been independently
fabricated, while the points of difference are so important as to make
it extremely improbable that the one was ever copied from the other.
Besides which, the essential identity of such myths as those of Sigurd
and Theseus, or of Helena and Sarama, carries us back historically to a
time when the scattered Indo-European tribes had not yet begun to
hold commercial and intellectual intercourse with each other, and
consequently could not have interchanged their epic materials or their
household stories. We are therefore driven to the conclusion--which,
startling as it may seem, is after all the most natural and plausible
one that can be stated--that the Aryan nations, which have inherited
from a common ancestral stock their languages and their customs, have
inherited also from the same common original their fireside legends.
They have preserved Cinderella and Punchkin just as they have preserved
the words for father and mother, ten and twenty; and the former case,
though more imposing to the imagination, is scientifically no less
intelligible than the latter.

Thirdly, it has been shown that these venerable tales may be grouped in
a few pretty well defined classes; and that the archetypal myth of each
class--the primitive story in conformity to which countless subsequent
tales have been generated--was originally a mere description of physical
phenomena, couched in the poetic diction of an age when everything was
personified, because all natural phenomena were supposed to be due to
the direct workings of a volition like that of which men were conscious
within themselves. Thus we are led to the striking conclusion that
mythology has had a common root, both with science and with religious
philosophy. The myth of Indra conquering Vritra was one of the theorems
of primitive Aryan science; it was a provisional explanation of the
thunder-storm, satisfac