disgusting. The Bushmen and Australians have, perhaps, no story of
the origin of species quite so barbarous in style as the anecdotes
about Phanes and Prajapati which are preserved in the Orphic hymns
and in the Brahmanas. The conduct of the earlier dynasties of
classical gods towards each other was as notoriously cruel and
loathsome as their behaviour towards mortals was tricksy and
capricious. The classical gods, with all their immortal might,
are, by a mythical contradiction of the religious conception,
regarded as capable of fear and pain, and are led into scrapes as
ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer Terrapin in the tales of
the Negroes of the Southern States of America. The stars, again,
in mythology, are mixed up with beasts, planets and men in the same
embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and the living, men,
beasts and gods, trees and stars, and rivers, and sun, and moon,
dance through the region of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus,
where everything may be anything, where nature has no laws and
imagination no limits.

Such are the irrational characteristics of myths, classic or
Indian, European or American, African or Asiatic, Australian or
Maori. Such is one element we find all the world over among
civilised and savage people, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus. It is no wonder that pious and reflective men have, in so
many ages and in so many ways, tried to account to themselves for
their possession of beliefs closely connected with religion which
yet seemed ruinous to religion and morality.

The explanations which men have given of their own sacred stories,
the apologies for their own gods which they have been constrained
to offer to themselves, were the earliest babblings of a science of