for many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society,
even in dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages
abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments will
survive in anything so closely connected as is mythology with the
conservative religious sentiment and tradition. Our object, then,
is to prove that the "silly, savage, and irrational" element in the
myths of civilised peoples is, as a rule, either a survival from
the period of savagery, or has been borrowed from savage neighbours
by a cultivated people, or, lastly, is an imitation by later poets
of old savage data.[1] For example, to explain the constellations
as metamorphosed men, animals, or other objects of terrestrial life
is the habit of savages,[2]--a natural habit among people who
regard all things as on one level of personal life and intelligence.
When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India, are also
popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals and
the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the
ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition
of the Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have
been borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage
or apt to copy savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a
poet of a late age may have invented a new artificial myth on the
old lines of savage fancy.


[1] We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas
which survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each
other, or use stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers
are not fully developed, and hasty analogy from their own
unreasoned consciousness is their chief guide. Myth, in Mr.
Darwin's phrase, is one of the "miserable and indirect consequences