grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of
exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same
stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must have
been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as often
happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably bring the
hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange speech. By
all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may account for the
diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales like the central
arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason. {102b}




APOLLO AND THE MOUSE.


Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered the
darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with a
mouse? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest calls on
him in the 'Iliad' (i. 39), might be rendered 'Mouse Apollo,' or 'Apollo,
Lord of Mice.' As we shall see later, mice lived beneath the altar, and
were fed in the holy of holies of the god, and an image of a mouse was
placed beside or upon his sacred tripod. The ancients were puzzled by
these things, and, as will be shown, accounted for them by
'mouse-stories,' [Greek], so styled by Eustathius, the mediaeval
interpreter of Homer. Following our usual method, let us ask whether
similar phenomena occur elsewhere, in countries where they are
intelligible. Did insignificant animals elsewhere receive worship: were
their effigies elsewhere placed in the temples of a purer creed? We find
answers in the history of Peruvian religion.