it is time to unmask him before laying him up in the box.

To drop metaphor, while nominally investigating a particular problem of
ancient mythology, I have really been discussing questions of more
general interest which concern the gradual evolution of human thought
from savagery to civilization. The enquiry is beset with difficulties of
many kinds, for the record of man's mental development is even more
imperfect than the record of his physical development, and it is harder
to read, not only by reason of the incomparably more subtle and complex
nature of the subject, but because the reader's eyes are apt to be
dimmed by thick mists of passion and prejudice, which cloud in a far
less degree the fields of comparative anatomy and geology. My
contribution to the history of the human mind consists of little more
than a rough and purely provisional classification of facts gathered
almost entirely from printed sources. If there is one general conclusion
which seems to emerge from the mass of particulars, I venture to think
that it is the essential similarity in the working of the less developed
human mind among all races, which corresponds to the essential
similarity in their bodily frame revealed by comparative anatomy. But
while this general mental similarity may, I believe, be taken as
established, we must always be on our guard against tracing to it a
multitude of particular resemblances which may be and often are due to
simple diffusion, since nothing is more certain than that the various
races of men have borrowed from each other many of their arts and
crafts, their ideas, customs, and institutions. To sift out the elements
of culture which a race has independently evolved and to distinguish
them accurately from those which it has derived from other races is a
task of extreme difficulty and delicacy, which promises to occupy
students of man for a long time to come; indeed so complex are the facts
and so imperfect in most cases is the historical record that it may be