scattered everywhere, in all the continents and isles, and everywhere are
much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of
race, so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of
folklore. The stone arrow-head buried in a Scottish cairn is like those
which were interred with Algonquin chiefs. The flints found in Egyptian
soil, or beside the tumulus on the plain of Marathon, nearly resemble the
stones which tip the reed arrow of the modern Samoyed. Perhaps only a
skilled experience could discern, in a heap of such arrow-heads, the
specimens which are found in America or Africa from those which are
unearthed in Europe. Even in the products of more advanced industry, we
see early pottery, for example, so closely alike everywhere that, in the
British Museum, Mexican vases have, ere now, been mixed up on the same
shelf with archaic vessels from Greece. In the same way, if a
superstition or a riddle were offered to a student of folklore, he would
have much difficulty in guessing its _provenance_, and naming the race
from which it was brought. Suppose you tell a folklorist that, in a
certain country, when anyone sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the
student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have
in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first
discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or
Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the
sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as
widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use
of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar weapons in
actual use among savages, so the salutation to the sneezer becomes
intelligible when we learn that the savage has a good reason for it. He
thinks the sneeze expels an evil spirit. Proverbs, again, and riddles
are as universally scattered, and the Wolufs puzzle over the same
devinettes as the Scotch schoolboy or the Breton peasant. Thus, for
instance, the Wolufs of Senegal ask each other, 'What flies for ever, and