it lived in the minds and unrestrained utterances of the people. We
generally have to study it in the works of mythographers, or in the poems
of later generations, when it had long ceased to be living and
intelligible.' The myths of Greece and Rome, in Hyginus or Ovid, 'are
likely to be as misleading as a hortus siccus would be to a botanist if
debarred from his rambles through meadows and hedges.' {0c}

Nothing can be more true, or more admirably stated. These remarks are,
indeed, the charter, so to speak, of anthropological mythology and of
folklore. The old mythologists worked at a hortus siccus, at myths dried
and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin. But we now
study myths 'in the unrestrained utterances of the people,' either of
savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class.
The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopoeic
state of mind--regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told
of a death in the family. Their myths are still not wholly out of
concord with their habitual view of a world in which an old woman may
become a hare. As soon as learned Jesuits like Pere Lafitau began to
understand their savage flocks, they said, 'These men are living in
Ovid's Metamorphoses.' They found mythology in situ! Hence mythologists
now study mythology in situ--in savages and in peasants, who till very
recently were still in the mythopoeic stage of thought. Mannhardt made
this idea his basis. Mr. Max Muller says, {0d} very naturally, that I
have been 'popularising the often difficult and complicated labours of
Mannhardt and others.' In fact (as is said later), I published all my
general conclusions before I had read Mannhardt. Quite independently I
could not help seeing that among savages and peasants we had mythology,
not in a literary hortus siccus, but in situ. Mannhardt, though he
appreciated Dr. Tylor, had made, I think, but few original researches
among savage myths and customs. His province was European folklore. What