IX.

_COMPARATIVE FOLK-LORE._

Folk-lore is often explained as the remains of ancient mythology, but

the explanation, though perhaps true of some traditional lore still

surviving in legends and fairy tales, seems of doubtful application to

those popular superstitions yet so prevalent among us, of which our

kitchens, our cottages, and our nurseries are the chief depositories.

Beliefs, fancies, and customs, however trivial in themselves, and locally

absurd, gain an interest from the area they cover and the races they

connect; suggesting past unions between nations now remote, in the same

way as the smallest weeds are capable of telling, by their geographical

dispersion, of lands that once stretched where seas now roll. To take

some instances. The English tradition that a swallow’s nest is lucky,

and its life protected by imaginary penalties, is one that in isolation

we should naturally and rightly disregard. But when we find that the

belief belongs to Germany, and that the supposed penalties are the same

in Yorkshire as they are in Swabia, our wonder is aroused; and when we

further learn that in China, too, the swallow’s nest is lucky and its

life inviolate, we become aware of a possible history and antiquity

attaching to the superstition, which offer an inviting field for

speculation and study. The belief, that the first appearance of mice in

a house betokens death, becomes of interest when we find it in Russia as

well as in Devonshire. Mothers there are both in Germany and in England

who fear their children may grow up to be thieves if their nails are cut

before their first year is over. Such superstitions, as we call them,

had, without doubt, once a reason; in some cases still to be traced, in

others effaced by the wear and tear of time. By the application to them

of the comparative method not only may we hope to explain and connect

ideas otherwise inexplicable, but also to come to conclusions not

uninteresting from an archæological point of view. For if it can be shown

that they are the remains of ancient barbarism rather than of ancient

mythology, their testimony may be added to that, long since given by the

more material relics and witnesses of early times, concerning the general

history of civilisation.

For the existence of similar traditions as of similar fairy-tales in

widely remote districts there are three possible hypotheses. These are,

migration, community of origin, or similarity of development. Either

they have spread from one place to another, or they are the legacies of

times when the people possessing them were actually united, or they have

sprung up independently in different localities, in virtue of the natural

laws of mental growth. It may be difficult of any given belief to say to

which of these three classes it belongs; but there are many beliefs, so

alike in general features, yet so divergent in detail, as best to accord

with the theory of a common descent or a common development. Some, for

instance, may be so common to the different nations of one stock, as to

be traceable to periods anterior to their dispersion; whilst others, yet

more widely spread than these, suggest relationships between races of men

more fundamental and remote than can be detected in language, and point

to an affinity that is older and stronger than mere affinity of blood, an

affinity, that is, in the conceptions and fancies of primitive thought.

For where actual relationship is not proved by language, analogies in

tradition are better accounted for by supposing similar grooves of mental

development than by any other theory. Philology may prove a relationship

between, let us say, the Nixens of Germany and the Nisses of Scandinavia:

but there is no relationship beyond similarity of conception between

the Nereids of antiquity and the mermaids of the North, or between the

Brownies of Scotland and the Lares of Latium. Children, of whatever race

or country they may be, dislike the dark, nor is it thought necessary to

account for this common trait by any theory of connection or descent.

So it is with nations. They are or were, in the face of nature, but as

children in the dark, and the nearly similar phenomena of sun and storm,

breeze and calm, have sufficed to create for them, in their several

homes, many of those fears and fancies we find common to them all.

No one who has not turned special attention to the subject, can form

any conception of the mass of purely pagan ideas, which, varnished over

by Christianity, but barely hidden by it, grow in rank profusion in our

very midst and exercise a living hold, which it is impossible either to

realise or to fathom, on the popular mind. Like old Roman or British

remains, buried under subsequent accumulations of earth and stones, or

superficially concealed by an overgrowth of herbage, uninjured during

all the length of time they have lain unobserved, there they lie just

beneath the surface of nineteenth-century life, as indelible records

of our mental history and origin. Only in the higher social strata can

they be deemed extinct; but if it can no longer be said, as it was in

the seventeenth century, that most houses of the West-end of London have

the horse-shoe on the threshold,[426] yet it may still be said of many

a farm or cottage in the country. The astronomer Tycho Brahe, if he met

an old woman or hare on leaving home, would take the hint to turn back:

but it seems to be only the working population of England, Scotland,

or Germany who still do the same. Statistics show that the receipts of

omnibus and railway companies in France are less on Friday than on any

other day; and many a German that lay dead on the carnage fields of the

late war was found to have carried his word-charm as his safest shield

against sword or bullet. Most English villages still have their wise men

or women, whose powers range, like those of the shamans in savage tribes,

from ruling the planets to curing rheumatics or detecting thieves; and

witchcraft still has its believers, occasionally its victims, as of

yore.[427]

We who have been brought up to look upon the classification of things

into animal, vegetable, and mineral, as primary, or indeed intuitive,

are apt to forget that savages never classify, and that animate and

inanimate to them are both alike. Sir John Lubbock has collected

conclusive evidence that so inconceivable a confusion of thought

exists.[428] The Tahitians, who sowed some iron nails that young ones

might grow from them; the Esquimaux, who thought a musical-box the child

of a small hand-organ; the Bushmen, who mistook a large waggon for the

mother of some smaller ones, show the tendency of savages to identify

motion with life, and to attribute feelings and relations such as actuate

or connect themselves to everything that moves of itself or is capable of

being moved. A native sent by one missionary to another with some loaves,

and a letter stating the number, having eaten two of them and been

detected through the letter, took the precaution the next time to put the

letter under a stone that it might not _see_ the theft committed.[429]

Now there are numerous superstitions, which there is reason to think are

relics of this savage state of thought, when all that existed existed

under the same conditions as man himself, capable of the same feelings,

and subject to the same wants and sorrows. Take, for example, bees. Bees

are credited with a perfect comprehension of all that men do and utter,

and, as members themselves of the family they belong to, they must

be treated in every way as human in their emotions. On the day of the

Purification in France it is customary in some parts for women to read

the Gospel of the day to the bees.[430] French children are taught that

the inmates of the hive will come out to sting them for any bad language

uttered within their hearing; and in South Russia it is believed ‘that

if any robbery be committed where a number of hives are kept, the whole

stock will gradually diminish, and in a short time die; for bees, they

say, will not suffer thieving.’[431] Many persons have probably at some

time of their lives, on seeing a crape-covered hive, learnt on inquiry

that the bees were in mourning for some member of their owner’s family.

In Suffolk, when a death occurs in a house, the inmates immediately

tell the bees, ask them formally to the funeral, and fix crape on their

hives; otherwise it is believed they would die or desert. And the same

custom, for the same reason, prevails, with local modifications, not only

in nearly every English county, but very widely over the continent. In

Normandy and Brittany may be seen, as in England, the crape-set hives;

in Yorkshire some of the funeral bread, in Lincolnshire some cake and

sugar, may be seen at the hive door; and a Devonshire nurse on her way

to a funeral has been known to send back a child to perform the duty

she herself had forgotten, of telling the bees. The usual explanation

of these customs and ideas is that they originated long ago with the

death or flight of some bees, consequent on the neglect they incurred

when the hand that once tended them could do so no longer. Yet a wider

survey of analogous facts leads to the explanation above suggested; for,

not to dwell on the fact that in some places in England they are informed

of weddings as well as of funerals, and their hives are decorated with

favours as well as with crape, the practice of giving information of

deaths extends in some parts not only to other animals as well, but, in

addition, to inanimate things. In Lithuania, deaths are announced, not

only to the bees, but to horses and cattle, by the rattling of a bunch of

keys, and the same custom is reported from Dartford in Kent. In the North

Riding, not long since, a farmer gravely attributed the loss of a cow

to his not having told it of his wife’s death. In Cornwall, the indoor

plants are often put into mourning as well as the hives; and at Rauen, in

North Germany, not only are the bees informed of their master’s death,

but the trees also, by means of shaking them. Near Speier, not only must

the bees be moved, but the wine and vinegar must be shaken, if it is

wished that they shall not turn bad. Near Würtemburg, the vinegar must be

shaken, the bird-cage hung differently, the cattle tied up differently,

and the beehive transposed. Near Ausbach the flower-pots must also

be moved, and the wine-casks knocked three times; while at Gernsheim,

not only must the wine in the cellar be shaken, to prevent it turning

sour, but the corn in the loft must be moved if the sown corn is to

sprout.[432] But all these customs, being too much alike to be unrelated,

and too widely spread to have sprung up without some reason, by some mere

caprice or coincidence, it is difficult to suggest any other reason for

them than that they go back to a time when not only bees and cattle, but

trees and flowers, vinegar and wine, were, like human beings, considered

liable to take offence, and capable also of being pacified by kind

treatment, since, according as their several temperaments predisposed

them, they were able, by deserting, dying, turning sour, or other

untoward conduct, to resent neglect or disrespect on the part of their

owners. Such beliefs belong to the lowest state of mental development, to

a time when the most obvious marks of natural differentiation were as yet

insufficient to produce corresponding distinctions in the minds of their

beholders.

Other popular traditions strengthen this interpretation. In Normandy

and Brittany it is thought that bees will not suffer themselves to be

bought or sold; in other words, that they would take offence if made the

subjects of sale and barter.[433] The same belief prevails in Cheshire,

Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall, and Devonshire, like the old Russian

rule that sacred images might not be spoken of as ‘bought’ but only as

‘exchanged for money.’[434] The value of bees is measured, not by money,

but by corn, hay, or some other exchangeable commodity; in Sussex, if any

money is given for bees, it must be gold. Connected with this idea of

the quasi-humanity of bees is the world-wide fear of slighting dangerous

animals by calling them by their customary names. Mahometan women dare

not call a snake a snake lest they should be bitten by one; Swedish

women avert the wrath of bears by speaking of them as old men. Livonian

fishermen, when at sea, fear to endanger their nets by calling any animal

by its common name. At Mecklenburg, in the twelve days after Christmas,

the fox goes by the appellation of the ‘Long Tail;’ even the timid mouse

by that of the ‘Floor-runner.’ The Esthonians at all times call the fox

‘Gray Coat,’ the bear ‘Broad-foot,’ and should they take the liberty of

too often mentioning the hare, their flax crops, they fear, would be in

peril. In Sweden people dare not mention to anyone in the course of the

day the number of fish they have caught, if they would catch any more; a

feeling to which is probably related the North-Country prejudice against

counting one’s fish before the day’s sport is over.

Witchcraft, although it represents a very low stage of religious

conception, yet in its primary idea of a sympathy or identity existing

between an original and its image, manifests some degree of intellectual

advancement. For the idea of vicarious or representative influence,

that if you wish to injure a man you can do so by an injury to a bit of

his clothing or a lock of his hair, is, so far as it goes, a spiritual

idea, presupposing notions about the interdependence of nature, and as

far as possible removed from what we understand by mere materialism.

Materialism indeed is one of the latest growths of the human mind, whilst

spiritualism is one of its earliest. For to a savage, everything that

exists lives and feels like himself, and the unseen spirits that surround

and affect him are as the motes in a sunbeam for variety and number. The

native Indian speaks of the earth as ‘the big plate where all the spirits

eat.’[435] Yet the fetichistic mode of thought is undoubtedly a low, and

to us an absurd one. Burnings in effigy may probably be traced to it, and

the stories so common in the annals of witchcraft of waxen images stuck

with pins or burned, in order to injure the person they represented,

undoubtedly belong to it. In America Kane found an Indian tribe who

believed that the hair of an enemy confined with a frog in a hole would

cause the owner of the hair to suffer the torments of the frog.[436] In

the Fiji Islands the health of a person can be made to fail with the

decay of a cocoa-nut buried under a temple.[437] The Finns are said to

this day to shoot in the water at images of their absent enemies. But

our own country has its analogies. In Suffolk, in the last century, if

an animal was thought to be bewitched, it was burned over a large fire,

under the idea that as it consumed away the author of its bewitchment

would consume away too. In Anglesey it is still believed that the name

of a person inscribed on a pipkin, containing a live frog stuck full of

pins, will injuriously affect the bearer of the name.

There are a numerous set of popular traditions which clearly relate to

the same state of thought. There is a feeling so wide that it may be

called European, that cut hair should always be burned, never thrown

away: the reason given in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and

near Saalfeld in Germany, being, that its discovery by a witch would

subject its owner to sorcery; that generally given in England and also

in Swabia being, that if a bird took any of it for its nest the bearer

would suffer from headache or lose the rest of his hair. A similar idea

prevails about teeth: all over England children are taught to throw

extracted teeth into the fire, lest a dog by swallowing them should

induce the toothache. So with the nail that has scratched you, or the

knife that has cut you,—keep the nail or knife free from rust, and the

wound will not fester. But all such ideas are explained by those actually

existent in savage parts, by the custom, for instance, of the Fijians

of hiding their cut hair in the thatch of the house, that it may not be

used against them in witchcraft, or by the practice of Zulu sorcerers

to destroy their victims by burying some of his hair, his nails, or his

dress in a secret place, that the decay of the one may ensure that of

the other. And a similar philosophy lies at the root of most popular

charms for certain complaints. The remedies for warts, for instance, are

all vicarious. Both at home and abroad the most usual method is to rub

a black snail on the wart, and then to hang it on a hedge, trusting to

the sympathetic decay of the wart and snail. But a piece of stolen raw

meat, a stalk of wheat or a hair with as many knots in them as there are

warts on the hand, or two apple halves tied together, will, if applied

to the part and then buried, cause effectual relief. The essential thing

is to ensure the decay of the representative object. In Somersetshire a

good ague cure is to shut up a large black spider in a box and leave it

to perish, that spider and ague may disappear together. In many places,

it is thought that the whooping-cough may be transferred to a hairy

caterpillar tied in a bag round the neck: as the insect dies the cough

will go. And in Devonshire some of the patient’s hair is given to a dog

between two slices of buttered bread, that the dog may take the hair

and the cough together; whilst in Sunderland the head is shaved and the

hair (risking we must suppose a headache) left on a bush for the birds

to carry off, that the cough itself may pass to them. May it not be said

that such customs and fancies betray a mental constitution radically

different from our present one, taking us back and ever reminding us of

the savagery of our lineage as surely as do flint-flakes or bone-needles,

and teaching us that only by the slowest degrees can emancipation be

achieved from the superstitions, or, as some think, from the poetry, of

ignorance?

Again, trees, stones, waters, stars, serpents, or animals, are all to

this day worshipped far and wide by uncivilised races, and the marks

of a similar object-worship by our own race still survive in many a

popular tradition. A law of Canute earnestly forbade the heathenship of

reverencing ‘the sun or moon, fire or flood, waterwhylls, or stones,

or trees of the wood of any sort;’ yet, if such things are no longer

worshipped, it may be certainly said that some of them are still

reverenced. To take, for instance, tree-worship. Both in Guiana and

Africa the natives have so superstitious a reverence for the silk cotton

tree that they fear to cut it down lest death should ensue.[438] In New

Zealand mythology, Rata was rebuked and put to shame by the spirits

of the forest for cutting down a tall tree-divinity for making his

canoe.[439] The trees which occupy the most prominent place in European

folk-lore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain ash. In

Denmark a twig of elder placed silently in the ground is a popular cure

for toothache or ague, whilst no furniture, least of all a cradle, may

be made of its wood; for the tree is protected by the Elder-mother,

without whose consent not a leaf may be touched, and who would strangle

the baby as it lay asleep. So also about Chemnitz, elder boughs fixed

before stalls keep witchcraft from the cattle; and wreaths of it hung up

in houses on Good Friday, after sunset, are believed to confer immunity

from the ravages of caterpillars. In Suffolk, it is the safest tree to

stand under in a thunderstorm, and misfortune will ensue if ever it is

burned. The legend that the cross was made of its wood is evidently an

aftergrowth, an attempt, of which we have so many examples, to give a

Christian colour to a heathen practice; for the elder was the tree under

which, in pre-Christian times, the old Prussian Earth-god was fabled to

dwell. Like the elder, the whitethorn was once an object of worship, for

it too is held to be scatheless in storms; and how else can we account

for the fact that in Switzerland, as in the Eastern counties of England,

to bring its flowers into a house is thought to bring death, than by

supposing it was once a tree too sacred to be touched, and likely to

avenge in some way the profanation that was done to it? Too deeply rooted

in popular veneration for its sacred character to disappear, the Church,

in course of time, wound its own legend round it, and by the fiction that

its wood had composed the Crown of Thorns, deprived the worship of its

heathen sting. But if round the elder and the thorn feelings of reverence

once gathered and still linger, yet more is it true of the rowan. In

England, Germany, and Sweden its leaves are still the most potent

instrument against the darker powers: Highlanders still insert crosses of

it with red thread in the lining of their clothes, and Cornish peasants

still carry some in their pocket and wind it round the horns of their

cattle in order to keep off evil eyes. In Lancashire sprigs of it are for

the same reason hung up at bedheads, and the churn staff is generally

made of its wood. It used to stand in nearly every churchyard in Wales,

and crosses of it were regularly distributed on Christian festivals as

sure preservatives against evil spirits. But this is another attempt to

Christianise what was heathen, for the ancient Danes always used some of

it for their ships, to secure them against the storms which Rân, the

great Ocean God’s wife, with her net for capsized mariners, was ever

ready and desirous to raise. The rowan in heathen mythology was called

Thor’s Helper, because it bent to his grasp in his passage over a flooded

river on his way to the land of the Frost Giants; and it has been thought

that the later sanctity of the tree may be due to the place it occupied

in mythological fancy. Yet it seems more reasonable to trace the myth to

a yet older superstition than to trace the superstition to the myth. For

from the exceeding beauty of their berries the rowan and the elder and

the thorn would naturally impress the savage mind with the feelings of

actual divinity, and would consequently lend themselves to the earliest

imaginings about the universe of things. It is more likely that they

progressed from a divinity on earth to their position in mythology than

from their position in mythology to a divinity on earth, for the mind

is capable of employing things for worship long before it is capable of

employing them for fable. Worship is the product of fear, and fable of

fancy; and before men can indulge in fancy they must to some extent have

cast off fear.

Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on

the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship.

The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans

used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from

different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the

discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of

the feelings that once attached to the animal still surviving round

the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably

accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself; and the

many superstitions connected with the flight or voice of birds resolve

themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all

sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages

and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret.

Why is the robin’s life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either

bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? It has been suggested that

the robin, on account of its colour, was once sacred to Thor, the god

of lightning; but it is possible that its red breast singled it out for

worship from among birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among

trees, long before its worshippers had arrived at any ideas of abstract

divinities. All over the world there is a regard for things red. Captain

Cook noticed a predilection for red feathers throughout all the islands

of the Pacific.[440] In the Highlands women tie some red thread round

the cows’ tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red

silk round their own fingers to keep off the witches: and just as in

Esthonia, mothers put some red thread in their babies’ cradles, so in

China they tie some round their children’s wrists, and teach them to

regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits.

One, indeed, of the chief lessons of Comparative Folk-Lore is a caution

against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan or other

mythology. The fact has been already alluded to, that in parts of China

the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But

there are yet other analogies between the East and the West. A crowing

hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany; and few

families in China will keep a crowing hen.[441] The owl’s voice is

ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in

Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages

death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow

also is in China a bird of ill omen. Is it not therefore likely that

all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way,

among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently

adopted but never originated by mythology? May it not be that certain

birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already

been prominent in superstition, rather than that they became prominent

in superstition because they previously had been prominent in mythology?

For instance, instead of tracing a dog’s howling as a death omen to an

Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to

its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an

already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do,

from a coincidence which suggested a connection, subsequently sustained

by superficial observation? The St. Swithin fallacy, which arose within

historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific

observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow

into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy.

Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity

occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago,

long before they had attained to any thoughts of soul or heaven, we can

well imagine that the dog, thus thought to betoken death, should, when

they came to frame the myth, be conceived as the guide which was waiting

for the soul to take it to heaven, and that the belief thus perpetuated

by the myth might survive to the latest ages.

There is abundant evidence in the practices to this very day, or till

lately, prevalent in England and Europe, that the worship of the sun

or of fire fills a large part in primitive religion. The passing of

children through the fire is not only a Semitic custom, but extends

wherever the human mind has attained to the idea of purification

and sacrifice. Some North American tribes used to burn to the sun a

man-offering in the spring, to the moon a woman-offering in the autumn,

expressing thereby their sense of the blessings of light and a desire

for their continuance. And traces of such fire-worship and of its

accompanying human sacrifices lasted in Europe into the very heart of

this century, and in many places still survive. The similarity that

exists between them, both in their seasons and mode of observance,

illustrates the marvellous sameness of ideas which may so often be found

among people in widely remote districts of the globe.

The three great festivals of the Druids took place on Mayday Eve, on

Midsummer Eve, and on All Hallow-e’en. On those days went up from cairns,

foothills, and Belenian heights fires and sacrifices to the sun-god

Beal: and from such fires the lord of the neighbourhood would take the

entrails of the sacrificed animal, and, walking barefoot over the ashes,

carry them to the Druid who presided over the ceremonies. These fires

have descended to us as the famous Beltane fires, lit still, or till

lately, in Ireland, Scotland, Northern England, and Cornwall, on the

eve of the summer solstice and at the equinoxes, usually on hill tops,

with rejoicing and merriment and leaping through the flames on the part

of all ages and sexes of the population.[442] It is possible that this

leaping through the flames is a relic of the time when men fell victims

to them, a modification of the more barbarous custom. In the Highlands,

where at the Beltane feast an oatmeal cake is toasted and portions of

it drawn for blindfold by the company as they sit in a trench round a

grass table, whosoever is the drawer of that portion which has been

purposely toasted black is devoted to Baal to be sacrificed, and must

leap perforce three times through the flames. In the same country it is,

or was, customary on Yeule or Christmas Eve to burn in a cartload of

lighted peat the stump of an old tree, which went by the name of Callac

Nollic, or Christmas Old Wife. And in several Continental traditions

we find the memory of a sacrifice still adhering to Midsummer Eve, or

St. John the Baptist’s Vigil. On that day, in Livonia, one or two old

boats were burned to the songs and dances of young and old; whilst at

Reichenbach, in the Voightland, a May-pole, planted on the green, was,

after similar festivities, thrown into the water. On the same day many

watermen still refrain from committing themselves to the Elbe, the

Unstrut, or the Elster, from the belief that upon that day those rivers

require a sacrifice; and the Saale is avoided for the same reason on

Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve, as well. From the latter cases we may infer

that, where rivers flowed near, a sacrifice by water was as usual as one

by fire, which possibly explains the custom so common in many places in

connection with these Beltane fires of rolling something lighted down a

hill, and, if possible, into a river. At Conz, on the Moselle, a burning

wheel was rolled down the hill into the river, and Scotch children at

the Beltane feast used to roll their bannocks three times down a hill

before consuming them round a good fire of heath and brushwood. So in

Swabia, wheels of lighted straw were rolled down the Frauenberg, and on

Scheiblen-Sonntag the young people still go by night to a hill, and after

dancing and singing round a fire, swing wooden wheels by means of a stick

round and round till they are thoroughly alight, and then fling them down

the hill. In North Germany, where the fires take place at Easter instead

of at Midsummer, lighted tar-barrels are rolled down the Osterberge.

The Church, to sanctify these fires, made the day of John the Baptist

coincident with Midsummer-day, and taught that the heathen customs were

symbolical of Christian doctrine. The fires themselves signified the

Baptist, that burning and shining light who was to precede the true

light; whilst the rolling wheels, as they represented the gradual descent

of the sun in heaven after it had reached the highest point, so they

illustrated the diminution of the fame of John, who was at first thought

to be the real Messiah, till on his own testimony he said, ‘He must

increase, but I must decrease.’ It has even been attempted in recent

times to show that the Midsummer fires, in spite of all their heathen

surroundings, were really of Christian origin, and in some way connected

with John the Baptist. The two chief objections to this theory are, the

survival of heathen names for the fires, as for instance, among others,

the name Himmelsfeuer, and not the usual Johannisfeuer, in one of the

districts of Upper Swabia, and also the close analogy, both in the idea

and mode of purification, which exists between the Midsummer fire for men

and the Needfires for cattle.

Needfires were fires through which cattle were driven if any disease

broke out amongst them. Such a fire was lit in Mull in 1767, and was not

only the method lately employed in Lower Saxony, but is said to be still

actually prevalent in Caithness. It would thus appear that after the

sacrifice to fire had been modified into the custom of passing through or

over it, the newer mode of cure gradually found its explanation in the

idea, that fire was a healing or purifying agent on account of its power

to drive away those evil spirits, which in savage estimation cause or

constitute natural disease. The essential thing was that all fires in the

neighbourhood should be first extinguished and new ones relit by means of

friction for the cattle to go through. The virtue lay in the new virgin

fire uncontaminated by previous use for any purpose whatsoever; and the

Forlorn Fires, which are said to be still lighted in Scotland when any

_man_ thinks himself the victim of witchcraft,[443] agree closely in

ceremonial with the Needfires for cattle. A notice having been given to

all the householders within the two nearest streams to extinguish all

lights and fires on a given morning, the sufferer and his friends on the

day cause the emission of new fire by a spinning-wheel or other means

of friction, and having spread it from some tow to a candle, thence to

a torch, and from the torch to a peatload, send it by messengers to

the expectant houses. But exactly similar purificatory effects were

attributed to the Midsummer fires. As far as their light reached, crops

enjoyed immunity from sorcery for a year, and the ashes collected from

them were a constant insurance against calamities of all sorts. Leaping

through them was held to avert malignant spirits for a year, and in many

places not only did men leap, but cattle were driven, through the flames.

Both America and Africa supply curious analogues to the Needfires of

Scotland. In the former the Mayas at a festivity in honour of their gods

of agriculture danced about the ashes of a burnt pile of wood, and passed

barefooted over the coals with or without injury, believing that thus

they would avert misfortune and appease the anger of the gods.[444] And

among the Hottentots Kolbe attests the custom of driving sheep through a

fire, and though the reason told to him for it was, the warding off the

attacks of wild dogs by the smell of smoke, the other ceremonies usual

on the occasion suggest the interpretation applicable to the Scotch

custom.[445] Purification by passing between two fires was also a custom

of the Tartars.[446]

Hence there is reason to think that the Midsummer fires were simply

annual and public Needfires, resembling the yearly harvest feasts of

the Creeks of North America, among whom, as among the ancients who

annually imported fresh fire from Delos to Lemnos, there was an idea

of a new and purified life commencing with a new and pure flame, after

all fires, debased by their subservience to human needs, had been first

extinguished. The Minnetarees at their feast of the new corn made a new

fire by drilling the end of a stick into a piece of hard wood;[447] and

the Sioux at their sacred feasts were wont to remove all fire from the

lodge and rekindle a fresh fire before cooking the food, in order to have

nothing unclean at the feast.[448] In India the Nagas, when they clear a

fresh piece of jungle, first put out their old fires, and produce a new

fire by friction, that of ordinary domestic use not being considered pure

enough for the purpose.[449]

The same idea has been found among the Indian tribes of South America.

There it was the duty of the high-priests ‘to guard the Eternal Fire in

the Rotunda; and, in the solemn, annual festival of the Busque, when

all the fires of the nation were extinguished, the high-priest alone

was commissioned, in the temple, to reproduce the celestial spark and

give new fire to the community.’[450] So that from this most remarkable

identity of conception between our forefathers and the native tribes of

America, it is evident there is nothing exclusively Indo-Germanic in the

holiness ascribed to virgin-fire, and that there is no need to ascribe to

Phœnician influence customs which occur where such influence is at most

uncertain. The wheel ignited by friction of its axle was, it has been

suggested, an emblem of the sun, and the old Aryan belief, that when the

sun was hidden by clouds its light was extinguished and needed renewing,

which could only take place by some god working a ‘pramantha’ in its cold

wheel till it glowed again, has been referred to as the possible root of

the custom. But such an origin being of difficult application outside the

geographical limits of Aryanism, it is obviously better to refer the myth

to the custom than the custom to the myth, and to a custom moreover which

is as wide as the world.

It may here be noticed in connection with the sacrificial customs which

were once a part of the heathen worship, that the idea of a sacrifice

to appease an angry spirit that has caused a disease is still far from

extinct. The burial of a live animal is still believed in Wärend and

North Sweden to prevent the cattle-plague, and an instance of such a

sacrifice to the earth spirits is said to have occurred in Jönköping so

recently as 1843. In Moray not long ago, whenever a herd of cattle was

seized with the murrain, one of them was buried alive, just as in the

North-west Highlands and in Cornwall a black cock is buried alive on the

spot where a person is first attacked by epilepsy; or as, in Algeria, one

is drowned in a sacred well for a similar purpose. A case is even cited

in this century of an Englishman who burned a live calf to counteract the

attacks of evil spirits.[451] Near Speier in Germany, if many hens or

pigs or ducks died in quick succession, one of their kind was thrown into

the fire, and the Esthonians, if a fire broke out, were wont to throw in

a black living fowl to appease the flames.

English country boys, when on the sight of a new moon they turn the

money in their pockets to ensure a constant supply there, have no idea

of the reason that once underlay the practice. But a wide comparison of

customs supplies us with a key; for we find everywhere a prevalent mental

association between the increase or wane of the moon and the increase or

wane of things on earth. Maladies, it is thought, will wane more readily

if the medicine be taken in the moon’s wane, and wood cut at that time

will burn better, just as, on the other hand, crops are more likely to

be plentiful if sown whilst the moon is young, and marriages more likely

to be happy. In some English counties pigs must be killed at the same

season, lest the pork should waste in boiling. In Germany it is the best

time for the father of a family to die, for in the latter half of the

month his death would portend the decrease of his whole family; it is

also the best time for counting money which it is desired may increase.

An invalid in face of a waning moon should pray that his pains may

diminish with it. Hence, too, the French idea that hair cut in the moon’s

wane will never grow again, or the similar one in Devonshire and Iceland,

that the rest will fall off; and hence probably the popular English

belief that the weather of the new moon foreshadows the weather for the

month. But are all these fancies relics of an old moon-worship, of the

existence of which we have other evidence, or simply expressions of that

feeling, once so prevalent, that there existed an intimate sympathy

between man and nature, and that everything which affected the former was

in some way or another typified by the latter? Analogy seems to favour

the latter hypothesis. For instance, all along the East coast of England

it is thought that most deaths occur at the fall of the tide, a sympathy

being imagined between the ebbing of the water and the ebbing of life;

and it is curious that Aristotle and Pliny entertained a similar idea,

the former with respect to all animals, the latter only about man; and

though Pliny’s observation of the fact was instigated by the statement

of his predecessor, it is likely that the latter was led to the inquiry

by the notoriety of a popular belief. The Cornish idea that deaths

are delayed till the ebb-tide, or the Icelandic one that more blood

flows from sheep killed while the sea is running out, or that chimneys

smoke more if built when the sea is running in, may be cited as similar

instances. The inhabitants of Esthonia, if a wolf runs away with a lamb,

think, by a kind of sympathy, to cause the wolf to drop it by themselves

dropping something out of their pockets. And in parts of England to this

day, the bloodstone is a remedy for a bleeding nose, and nettle-tea for a

nettle-rash; just as turmeric was once accounted a cure for the jaundice

on account of its yellow colour, and the lungs of a fox were held good

for asthma on account of that animal’s respiratory powers.

Water-worship, whether as river, lake, or spring, seems as widely spread

as that of trees or other natural objects, and the numerous traditions

connected with it form yet another link between our civilised present

and our barbarous past. ‘There is scarcely,’ says a writer on Lancashire

Folk-Lore, ‘a stream of any magnitude in either Lancashire or Yorkshire,

which does not possess a presiding spirit in some part of its course.’

A water-spirit that haunts some stepping-stones near Clitheroe is still

believed once in every seven years to require a human life; nor is it

long since a farmer in Anglesea had to drain a well belonging to him,

on account of the damage done by persons resorting thither, under the

belief that if they cursed the disease they suffered from and dropped

pins about the well, they would shortly be cured. There is still a

pin-well in Northumberland, and another in Westmoreland, wherein country

girls in passing throw an offering of pins to the resident spirits. So in

Ireland, votive rags may be seen on trees and hedges that surround sacred

wells, whither people travel great distances in order to crawl an uneven

number of times in the sun’s direction round the water, hoping thereby to

propitiate the fairies and to avert sorceries.[452] St. Gowen’s well on

the coast of Pembroke was lately or is still frequented for the cure of

paralysis and other maladies, and there are few counties in England where

the dedication of curative wells to Christian saints does not betray

the attempt to hallow and hide a heathen practice under a Christian

name. In Northampton alone we find St. Lawrence’s at Peterborough, St.

John’s at Boughton, St. Rumbald’s at Brackley, St. Loy’s at Weedon-Loys,

St. Dennis’ at Naseby, St. Mary’s at Hardwick, and St. Thomas’ at

Northampton. So in Normandy, people still resort from all parts of the

province, on the eve of the first of June, to the fountain of St.

Clotilde, near Andelys, and there are other French wells of no inferior

celebrity. As English peasants propitiate bad water-spirits by presents

of pins, so do the Bretons by slices of bread and butter; and the

Livonians, before starting on a voyage, calm the sea-mother by a libation

of brandy.[453] But water, in addition to its dangerous and curative

properties, is supposed to contain prophetic ones as well. The Castalian

fountain in Greece was prophetic; and as the Laconians, by cakes thrown

into a pool sacred to Juno, used to augur good or bad to themselves

according as their cakes sank or floated, so do our Cornish countrymen

by dropping pins or pebbles into wells read futurity in the signs of the

bubbles.

The belief in unseen spirits, which underlies many of the foregoing

superstitions, as it is one of the earliest beliefs of the human mind,

so it is one of the most persistent. The worship of water, fire, and

other natural objects probably arose from a dread of spirits thought

to be resident within them, whom it was as well to cajole by gifts and

prayers. Earth and air, like fire and water, were peopled respectively

with invisible demons, which survive in still current traditions of the

Gabriel Hounds, the Seven Whistlers, fairies, elves, and all their tribe.

Our countrymen in Cornwall, if the breeze fail while they are winnowing,

whistle to the Spriggian, or air-spirits, to bring it back; and the

Esthonians on the Gulf of Finland do, or did, precisely the same. In

Northamptonshire, till lately, women used to sweep the hearth before they

went to bed, and leave vessels of water for the ablutions of the fairies

or spirits of the earth, just as in Siberia food is placed daily in the

cellar for the benefit of the Domavoi or house-spirits. In Scotland green

patches may still be seen on field or moor left uncultivated as ‘the

gudeman’s croft,’ by which it has been hoped to buy the goodwill of the

otherwise evil-disposed Devil or earth-spirit; and it is doubtless from

a similar fear of showing neglect or disrespect that Esthonian peasants

dislike parting with any earth from their fields, and in drinking beer

or eating bread recognise the existence and wants of the earth-spirit by

letting some drops of the one and some crumbs of the other find their way

to the floor.[454]

The foregoing instances of actual Folk-Lore, many of them now mere

meaningless survivals, seem only intelligible on the ground that they

have descended to us either from the earliest inhabitants of Western

Europe, or from times when our Aryan progenitors were perhaps not unlike

modern Fuejians. The existence has been proved, not only in England but

throughout Europe, of phases of thought and modes of worship closely

similar to those still found among actual savages. There is no nation

that we know in the present or read of in the past so cultivated as not

to retain many spots from the dark ages of its infancy and ignorance;

but these, absurd as they may seem, hold the rank and claim the interest

of prehistoric antiquities. The fact that there still survive among

civilised people ideas and practices, corresponding in structure to those

found in the various stages of the lower races, is of the same force to

prove that we once went through those several stages, as the survival of

traits in the growth of the individual, similar to those actually found

in lower animals, point to our gradual ascent from a lower scale of

being. The belief in, and dread of, evil spirits; the endeavour to affect

them by acting on their fetishes or substitutes; the worship of natural

objects, as trees, animals, water or even stones; the mistaking of mere

sequence in time for causal connection and the consequent importance

attached to such occurrences as have been observed to precede remarkable

phenomena,—these and many other characteristics of modern savages find

abundant representation in modern civilisation, and it is more likely

they are there as survivals than as importations.

But it may be urged that no necessary antiquity can be asserted of

traditions simply on account of the wide area they range over, and

instances may be cited of Christian superstitions no less widely extended

than many above mentioned. The belief, for instance, that about midnight

on Christmas Eve, cattle rise on their knees to salute the Nativity, is

found with slight modifications in England, Brittany, the Netherlands,

and Denmark. In Cornwall a strong prejudice exists against burying on

the north side of a church, and precisely the same feeling is found in

Esthonia, for the reason there given that at the end of the world all

churches will fall on that side. So, too, the custom of opening all

doors and windows at a death, to give free outlet to the departing soul,

prevails no less in the south of Spain than in England or in parts of

Germany.

To this objection there are two answers: first, that the capacity of

superstitions to spread widely and rapidly is by no means denied;

secondly, that many Christian traditions are really heathen, though their

origin and meaning may now be lost. For the policy of the Church towards

paganism, though at times one of radical opposition, was generally one

better calculated for success. It learned to prefer gradual triumphs

to speedy conquests, aware that the former were more likely to last,

and was pleased to satisfy its conscience and hide its impotence under

connivance and compromise. It assimilated beliefs which it could not

destroy, and glossed over what it could not erase, substituting simply

its saints and angels for the gods and spirits of older cults. On Monte

Casino, near Rome, there existed down to the sixth century a temple

sacred to Apollo, till St. Benedict came and, like another Josiah, broke

the idols and overthrew the altar and burned the grove, but set up a

temple to St. Martin in its stead. And this case is typical of the way

in which obstinate heathen rites were diverted and customs consecrated.

Some illustrations may be added to those already incidentally alluded

to, since they serve to explain how so many relics of heathenism have

resisted centuries of Christian teaching. The Scandinavian water-spirit,

Nikur, inhabitant of lakes and rivers and raiser of storms, whose favour

could only be won by sacrifices, became in the middle ages St. Nicholas,

the patron of sailors and sole refuge in danger; and near St. Nicholas’

church at Liverpool there stood a statue of the Christian saint, to whom

sailors used to present a peace-offering when they went to sea, and a

wave-offering when they returned. So it was with sacred trees and flowers

and waters. Their sanctity was transferred, not destroyed. St. Boniface,

with the wood of the oak he so miraculously felled, raised an oratory

to St. Peter, to whom were thenceforth paid the honours of Thor. Nobody

ventured the more to touch the famous oak at Kenmare when blown down

by a storm, because it had been handed over to the protection of St.

Columba, nor did a fragment of St. Colman’s oak held in the mouth the

less avert death by hanging because it had been sanctified by the name of

a saint. The Breton princes, before they entered the church at Vretou,

offered prayers under a yew outside, which was said to have sprung from

St. Martin’s staff and to have been so replete with holiness that the

very birds of the air left its berries untouched. The great goddess

Freja could only be banished from men’s thoughts by transferring what

had been sacred to her to the Virgin Mary; and the names of such common

plants as Lady’s Grass, Lady’s Smock, Lady’s Slipper, Lady’s Mantle,

and others, attest to this day the wrong that was done to the Northern

goddess. Bits of seaweed called Lady’s Trees still decorate many a

Cornish chimney-piece, and protect the house from fire and other evils.

The Ladybird was once Freja’s bird; and Orion’s belt, which in Sweden is

still called Freja’s spindle, in Zealand now belongs to her successor

Mary. In the same way Christmas has supplanted the old Yule festival, and

the Yule log still testifies to the rites of fire-worship once connected

with the season. So we now keep Easter at the time when our pagan

forefathers used to sacrifice to the goddess Eostre, and hot cross-buns

are perhaps the descendants of cakes once eaten in her honour, on which

the mark of Christianity has taken the place of some heathen sign.

Such then is the evidence which Comparative Folk-Lore affords in

confirmation of the teaching of history, that the people from whom we

inherit our popular traditions were once as miserable and savage as those

we now place in the lowest scale of the human family. The evidence that

the nations now highest in culture were once in the position of those now

the lowest is ever increasing, and the study of Folk-Lore corroborates

the conclusions long since arrived at by archæological science. For, just

as stone monuments, flint knives, lake-piles, or shell-mounds point to

a time when Europeans resembled races where such things are still part

of actual life, so do the traces in our social organism of fetishism,

totemism, and other low forms of thought, connect our past with people

where such forms of thought are still predominant. The analogies with

barbarism which still flourish in civilised communities seem only

explicable on the theory of a slow and more or less uniform metamorphosis

to higher types and modes of life, whilst they enforce the belief that

before long it will appear a law of development, as firmly established

on the inconceivability of the contrary, that civilisation should emerge

from barbarism, as that butterflies should first be caterpillars, or

that ignorance should precede knowledge. In this way superstition itself

turns to the service of science, confirming its teaching, that the

history of humanity has been a rise, not a fall, not a degradation from

completeness to imperfection, but a constantly accelerating progress from

savagery to culture; that, in short, the iron age of the world belongs to

the past, its golden one to the future.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The justification of the use of the word _force_ is not far to seek.

One of the demands in the ultimatum addressed to Cetewayo, which helped

to bring about the present unhappy Zulu war, was for the reinstatement

of missionaries in Zululand. A Natal correspondent of the _Times_,

January 28, 1879, justly observes about this: ‘If the Zulus object to

missionaries—_who certainly in many cases have acted as spies_—why

_force_ missionaries upon them?’ The italics are not the correspondent’s.

[2] See on this subject Mr. Wallace’s _Tropical Nature_, pp. 290-300.

[3] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, ii. 312, 313, 333.

[4] Sproat, _Savage Life_, 178, 179, 209, 210.

[5] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 173; and Bancroft, iii. 105.

[6] Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 121-4.

[7] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, v. p. 155.

[8] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iv. 496. See Dr. Brinton’s explanation of the

story in his _Myths of the New World_, pp. 170-3.

[9] Humboldt, _Personal Narrative_, v. 595-7.

[10] Forbes Leslie, _Early Races in Scotland_, i. 177.

[11] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 155-7, where the beliefs are

referred to. Franklin’s _Second Journey_, p. 308. They are so remarkable

as to arouse suspicion that European influence has affected the native

imagination; but the influence, if any, seems beyond the reach of

criticism in this as in other striking cases of analogy.

[12] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iv. 255.

[13] Hutton, _Voyage to Africa_, p. 320; and Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi.

396.

[14] Schoolcraft, iv. 90.

[15] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, vii. 368.

[16] _Trans. Eth. Soc._ iii. 233, 234; Oldfield’s _Aborigines of

Australia_.

[17] Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States_, iii. 112.

[18] Brinton, pp. 198, 199.

[19] Brinton, p. 210.

[20] Catlin, ii. 127. For some other deluge-myths of a similar kind see

Bancroft, iii. 46, 47, 64, 75, 76, 88, 100; Turner’s _Polynesia_, p. 249;

Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 386; Franklin, i. 113; Sir G. Grey,

_Polynesian Mythology_, 61; Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, pp. 381,

385, 398, 399; Dall, _Alaska_, p. 423.

[21] Koehler, _Volksbrauch im Voightland_, p. 444. ‘Dem Verstorbenen

giebt man die Gegenstände mit in das Grab, welche er im Leben am liebsten

hatte: so ist es geschehen, dass man selbst Regenschirm und Gummischühe

mitgab. (Reichenbach.) ... In Schweden hat man dem Todten Tabakspfeife,

Tabaksbeutel, Geld und Feuerzeug mitgegeben, damit er nicht spuke.... In

einem Grabe des Gottesackers zu Elsterberg wurde eine Anzahl Kupfermünzen

gefunden.’

[22] This fact has been denied in King’s _Greek Church_, p. 358, but it

is mentioned by most of the earliest English travellers in Russia; by

Chancelor, in _Hackluyt’s Voyages_, i. 283; Jenkinson, ibid., p. 361; and

Fletcher, _Russe Commonwealth_, 106; as well as by later ones.

[23] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 165.

[24] Stevenson, _Travels in South America_, i. 58.

[25] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 166.

[26] See Brinton, p. 242. ‘Nowhere (in the New World) was any

well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the

next world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torments and a

realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar,

the coward, and the niggard.’

[27] For other instances of the myth of the heaven-bridge, and its wide

range, see Mr. Tylor’s _Early History of Mankind_, p. 348.

[28] Williams, _Fiji_, i. 244.

[29] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, iii. 71-77.

[30] Mariner, ii. 137.

[31] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, ii. 315. ‘Jedes Thier, auch die kleinste

Fliege, ersteht sofort nach ihrem Tode und lebt unter der Erde.’

[32] Klemm, _Cultur-Geschichte_, iii. 83. ‘Endlich wurden die besonderten

Theile nebst den Knochen in der Kiste begraben. Man glaubte, das

Opferthier werde von den Göttern wieder belebt und in den Saiwo versetzt.’

[33] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 89.

[34] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, v. 91, 403; ii. 68.

[35] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 268.

[36] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 350.

[37] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 536.

[38] _Cape Monthly Magazine_, July 1874.

[39] Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_, pp. 15, 18.

[40] Steller, _Kamschatka_, p. 280.

[41] Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, ii. 170.

[42] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, pt. ii. 182.

[43] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 437-444.

[44] Waitz, ii. 169.

[45] Ellis, i. 402.

[46] Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, p. 297.

[47] Page 150.

[48] Pinkerton, xvi. 304.

[49] Pinkerton, xvi. 388, 874.

[50] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 176.

[51] Dieffenbach, p. 28.

[52] Gill, p. 36.

[53] Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, p. 370.

[54] Harmon, _Journal of Voyages, &c._, p. 345.

[55] Brinton, p. 126.

[56] Bancroft, iii. 370-3. For baptismal rites in Northern Europe before

Christianity, see Mallet, _Northern Antiquities_, p. 205.

[57] Franklin, _Journey to the Polar Sea_, p. 255.

[58] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, ii. 299.

[59] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 237.

[60] Callaway, i. 33.

[61] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 187.

[62] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 250.

[63] Harmon, _Journal of Voyages_, p. 363.

[64] Lord Kames, _History of Man_, vol. iv., asserts this of many tribes,

the Tahitians, Hottentots, and others. See also pp. 234, 238, 297.

[65] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, i. 480.

[66] Cf. Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 250, and Du Chaillu’s _Explorations_,

pp. 202-3.

[67] Lichtenstein, ii. 332; Callaway, i. 111.

[68] Pinkerton, xvi. 402, 530.

[69] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iv. 635-7. The admission quoted seems

to cancel the statements repeated clearly and positively in i. 16, 17,

32, 35, 38, and iii. 60, of a dualism as decided as that between Ahriman

and Ormuzd. In i. 32 it is said that the _first_ notice of such a

doctrine occurs in Charlevoix, _Voyage to North America in 1721_.

[70] Schoolcraft, iv. 642-3.

[71] _Ibid._, ii. 195, 197; iii. 231.

[72] Schoolcraft, ii. 131.

[73] Franklin, i. 114-15.

[74] Ellis, i. 350.

[75] Klemm, iii. 120.

[76] Kames, _History of Man_, iv. 327.

[77] Kames, _History of Man_, iv. 321.

[78] Klemm, vi. 423.

[79] Brinton, p. 298.

[80] Schoolcraft, iii. 226.

[81] Brinton, p. 297.

[82] Turner, _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_, pp. 88, 200, 239.

[83] Williams, p. 144.

[84] Ellis, i. 349.

[85] Catlin, i. 133; ii. 247. Cf. Schoolcraft, iii. 243.

[86] Bancroft, _Native Races, &c._, ii. 705.

[87] Bancroft, _Native Races, &c._, iii. 428; Burton, _Mission to

Gelele_, ii. 18-25.

[88] Klemm, ii. 216, from Langsdorf, ii. 261.

[89] Sproat, p. 66. The Juangs of Bengal practise a bear dance, a pigeon

dance, a pig dance, a tortoise dance, a quail dance, a vulture dance.

Dalton, _Desc. Eth. of Bengal_, p. 156; and see _New Encyc. Brit._ for

similar cases: article, ‘Dance.’

[90] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 200.

[91] Sproat, p. 208.

[92] Bancroft, _Native Races_, iii. 167.

[93] Ellis, i. 348.

[94] Latham, _Desc. Eth._, i. 459.

[95] Catlin, i. 127, 164, 182.

[96] Klemm, ii. 120. ‘Ahmten die knarrende röchelnde Stimme des

Bisonthiers in grosser Vollkommenheit nach.’

[97] Catlin, i. 244-5.

[98] Schoolcraft, iii. 487.

[99] ‘Ein wunderbares Spiel, das zum glücklichen Erfolg des Untermehmens

_durchaus nothwendig_ gehalten wird.’

[100] Lichtenstein, i. 444.

[101] Mrs. Eastman, _Dahcotah_, p. 77.

[102] Sproat, p. 146.

[103] Collins, _New South Wales_, p. 368.

[104] Callaway, i. 125.

[105] Schoolcraft, iv. 80.

[106] _Ibid._, iii. 285.

[107] Isert, _Guinea_, in French translation, p. 204: ‘L’action de ramer

voulait dire que leurs maris allaient passer la rivière Volta pour se

battre avec les Augéens et les noyer; la truelle et le travail de maçon

indiquait l’érection de fort Konigstein.’

[108] Casalis, p. 265.

[109] Schoolcraft (Prescott), iii. 230.

[110] Schoolcraft, iii. 273, 231.

[111] Gill, 312.

[112] Pinkerton, xvi. 875.

[113] Pinkerton, xvi. 875.

[114] Livingstone, _South Africa_, p. 235.

[115] Franklin, _First Journey_, i. 160.

[116] Wuttke, _Deutsche Volksaberglaube_, p. 14.

[117] Polwhele, _History of Cornwall_, p. 48.

[118] ‘Da Dios alas á la hormiga para que se pierda mas aina,’ is the

Spanish version.—_Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs_, 210. Compare with

Roebuck’s _Persian and Hindoostanee Proverbs_, i. 365, and ii. 283;

Thornburn’s _Afghan Frontier_, 279; and Burckhardt’s _Arabic Proverbs_.

[119] Most of the African proverbs here referred to are taken from

Captain Burton’s collection from various sources in his _Wit and Wisdom

of West Africa_.

[120] _Central Africa_, p. 289.

[121] Oscar Peschel, _The Races of Mankind_, translation, p. 150.

[122] Casalis, _Les Basutos_, pp. 324-8.

[123] Captain Burton justly calls attention to the possibility of many

Yoruban proverbs being relics of the Moslems, who, in the tenth century,

overran the Soudan.

[124] For a collection of Pashto proverbs see Thornburn’s _Afghan

Frontier_, 1876.

[125] Sir G. Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, p. 21.

[126] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 97.

[127] Callaway, ii. 171.

[128] Burton, _Mission to Dahome_, ii.

[129] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i. 333.

[130] Trench, _On the Study of Words_, p. 17.

[131]

‘Nec commune bonum poterant spectare nec ullis

Moribus inter se scierant nec legibus uti.’—V. 956.

So Virgil, _Æn._, viii. 317.

[132] Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific States of North America_, i.

426, 560.

[133] Peschel, _Races of Man_, pp. 39, 209.

[134] Burchell, _Travels in Southern Africa_, i. 456-62. Compare Waitz,

_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, i. 376. Also Wuttke, _Geschichte des

Heidenthums_, p. 164. _Ein Brudermord wurde von ihnen als etwas ganz

Harmloses erzählt._

[135] Bancroft, _Native Races_, i. 348.

[136] _Ibid._, i. 130.

[137] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 69.

[138] Bancroft, i. 520, 553.

[139] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 416.

[140] Kane, _Wanderings of an Artist_, p. 115.

[141] Catlin, _North American Indians_, ii. 192.

[142] Bancroft, iii. 167.

[143] Turner, _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_, p. 285.

[144] Sir G. Grey, _Journals in Australia_, ii. 239.

[145] Williams, _Fiji_.

[146] _Old New Zealand._ By a Pakeha Maori, p. 105.

[147] Harmon’s _Journal_, pp. 299, 300.

[148] Seemann says of Fijian cruelty (_Viti_, p. 192): ‘Affection for the

departed—of course mistaken affection—prompted their relatives or friends

to dispatch widows at the time of their husband’s burial,’ &c.

[149] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 294-5.

[150] Mariner, ii. 233.

[151] Pinkerton, xvi. 595, from Froyart’s _Loango_.

[152] Fitzroy, _Voyages of ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle,’_ ii. 574.

[153] _Old New Zealand_, pp. 96-100.

[154] Lichtenstein, i. 259.

[155] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, i. 39.

[156] Livingstone, _Missionary Travels in South Africa_, p. 255.

[157] Harmon, _Journal_, p. 300.

[158] Turner, _Polynesia_, p. 224.

[159] Bancroft, iii. 486.

[160] Fitzroy, _Voyages_, ii. 180.

[161] Sproat, _Scenes and Studies of Savage Life_, p. 265.

[162] Shortland, _Southern Districts of New Zealand_, p. 30.

[163] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 225, 236.

[164] Kane, p. 205.

[165] _Ibid._; Seemann, p. 190.

[166] Bancroft, i. 245, 285, 438.

[167] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 78.

[168] Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 158.

[169] Dobritzhoffer, _Abipones_, ii. 203, 274.

[170] Burton, _Mission_, i. 231.

[171] Bancroft, ii. 357.

[172] Dali, _Alaska_, 524. For instances of the feeling in North America

see Bancroft, i. 205, 288, 544, 745; iii. 521, 522.

[173] Gill, _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_, p. 154.

[174] _Ibid._, p. 38.

[175] Catlin, _North American Indians_, i. 157.

[176] Bancroft, iii. 519; and other instances in the same work, chapter

xii.

[177] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 247.

[178] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 403, 404.

[179] Dr. Brinton (p. 250) says that no ethical bearing was assigned

to the myth of the future by the red race till they were taught by

Europeans, and that all Father Brebeuf could find was, that the souls of

suicides and persons killed in war lived apart from others after death.

[180] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 285.

[181] Mariner, _Tongan Islands_, ii. 154.

[182] Peschel, 428-31.

[183] The collection of native Bushman literature is said to have reached

eighty-four volumes! In Dr. Bleek’s _Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore_,

and in the _Cape Monthly Magazine_ for July 1874, some account is given

of their mythology.

[184] Comp. Bancroft, i. 771, and Humboldt, _Personal Narrative_, v. 269.

[185] Steller, _Kamschatka_, pp. 234, 355.

[186] Schoolcraft, _I. T._, iii. 191.

[187] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 51; Burton, _Dahome_, ii. 76; Pinkerton,

xvi. 492.

[188] Bancroft, ii. 194, and i. 414, 280. Compare Catlin, i. 170; and

Grote’s _Greece_, for an ordeal at Sparta.

[189] Dieffenbach, p. 667.

[190] Callaway, ii. 196.

[191] Burton, _Mission_, ii. 157.

[192] Turner, p. 236.

[193] Sproat, p. 213.

[194] Dobritzhoffer, _Abipones_, ii. 204, 441.

[195] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iv. 101.

[196] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 29.

[197] Jarves, _History of Hawaii_, p. 23.

[198] Brett, _Wild Tribes of Guiana_, p. 131.

[199] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iii. 104.

[200] Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 149.

[201] Mariner, _Tongan Islands_, i. 380, 403.

[202] _Travels in Australia_, ii. 228.

[203] Bancroft, i. 109

[204] In Papworth’s _Ordinary of British Armorials_, no less than 124

pages are filled with the names of families who take their crest from

some animal; 34 pages of families take their crests from the lion alone.

[205] Herberstein, i. 32.

[206] Kempper, _Japan_; Pinkerton, vii. 718.

[207] Turner, p. 343.

[208] Reade, _Savage Africa_, p. 43.

[209] Burton, _Mission_, ii. 367; and Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 318.

[210] Jarves, _History of Hawaii_, pp. 21, 23.

[211] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iii. 97.

[212] _See_ Klemm, iii. 330, for the custom in Loango; Reade, _Savage

Africa_, p. 43, for that in Ashantee; and Peschel, _Races of Man_, p.

235, for other instances.

[213] _Savage Africa_, p. 48.

[214] Williams, p. 40.

[215] Santo, _Eastern Ethiopia_. Pink, xvi. 698.

[216] Dieffenbach, ii. 100.

[217] Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 100. It has generally been thought

best, in referring to books written some time ago, to employ the past

tense where possibly the present would still be applicable. Wherever the

present is used, it must be taken to refer not necessarily to the actual

present but to the present of the original authority for the fact.

[218] Steller, _Kamschatka_, p. 356.

[219] Eschwege, _Brazilien_, i. 221.

[220] Bancroft, _Native Races of Pacific States_, i. 168.

[221] Catlin, ii. 240.

[222] Pinkerton. Bosnian, _Guinea_, xvi. 406.

[223] Denham, _Discoveries in Africa_, i. 167.

[224] Turner, _Polynesia_, p. 286.

[225] Elphinstone, _Caubul_, ii. 223.

[226] Thompson, _South Africa_, ii. 351.

[227] _See_ Bancroft, ii. 454-472, for the penal code of the Aztecs.

[228] Pinkerton. Froyart, _History of Loango_, xvi. 581.

[229] Hutton, _Voyage to Africa_, p. 319.

[230] Pinkerton, xvi. 242, in Merolla’s _Voyage to Congo_.

[231] Pinkerton. Bosman, _Guinea_, xvi. 405. For an account of a savage

law suit, see Maclean’s _Caffre Laws and Customs_, pp. 38-43.

[232] Maclean, _Caffre Laws_, p. 34.

[233] Pinkerton, xvi. 259.

[234] Livingstone, _South Africa_, pp. 621, 642.

[235] Schweinfurth, _Heart of Africa_, i. 285.

[236] Klemm, _Culturgeschichte_, iii. 334.

[237] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 250.

[238] Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 378; iv. 423.

[239] Pinkerton, xvi. 690.

[240] Wuttke, _Geschichte des Heidenthums_, p. 102, speaking of savage

ordeals, says: ‘Wir können nicht sagen, dass ein monotheistischer Gedanke

hier vorhanden sei; die Menschen glauben an die Gerechtigkeit des

Schicksals noch nicht an einen gerechten Gott.’

[241] Turner, _Polynesia_, pp. 215, 241, 293.

[242] Klemm, iii. 68.

[243] Wuttke, _Geschichte des Heidenthums_, p. 103.

[244] Burckhardt, _Notes on the Bedouins_, p. 73.

[245] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, ii. 98.

[246] Klemm, iv. 334.

[247] Maclean, pp. 124, 110.

[248] Klemm, iii. 69.

[249] Dalton, _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_, p. 64.

[250] Seemann, _Mission to Viti_, p. 192.

[251] Mariner, ii. 302.

[252] Ellis, iii. 349.

[253] Earle, _Indian Archipelago_, p. 81.

[254] Pinkerton, xvi. 872.

[255] _Ibid._, p. 697.

[256] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 305.

[257] Lichtenstein, ii. 48.

[258] Portlock’s _Voyage_, p. 260, in Bancroft, i. 110.

[259] Cranz, i. 149, 150, 174, 218.

[260] _Travels in Australia_, ii. 355; and Bonwick, _Daily Life of the

Tasmanians_, pp. 10, 78-98.

[261] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, Prof. Owen, ii. 36.

[262] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, ii. 291.

[263] _Ibid._, i. 264.

[264] _Nuova Antologia_, Jan. 1876.

[265] Ellis, i. 268.

[266] Mariner, i. 271-7.

[267] These stories are worth reading at length in Grey’s _Polynesian

Mythology_, pp. 233-246, 296-301. See also pp. 246-273, 301-313. For a

good Zulu love-story see Leslie’s _Among the Zulus_, pp. 275-284; and,

for a Tasmanian love-legend, Bonwick, p. 34.

[268] Smiles, _Self-help_, p. 325; Pennant’s _Tour_, in Pinkerton, iii.

89: ‘Their tender sex are their only animals of burden.’

[269] Weddell, _Voyage to South Pole_, 1825, p. 156.

[270] Seemann, p. 192.

[271] Dalton, _Bengal_, p. 28.

[272] _Indian Tribes_, v. 131-2.

[273] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, p. 544.

[274] Bancroft, i. 110.

[275] _Heart of Africa_, i. 472; ii. 28.

[276] The best illustration of this side of savage life, of the sorrow

felt by a bride on leaving her home, occurs in the _Finnish Kalewala_, in

Schiefner’s German translation, pp. 126-132, 147-150.

[277] Dobell, _Travels in Kamtschatka_, &c., ii. 293.

[278] Holderness, _Journey from Riga_, p. 233.

[279] Hakluyt, i. 360; Pierson, _Russlands Vergangenheit_, pp. 202, 208.

[280] Marmier, _Sur la Russie_, ii. 154. ‘Au moment de se mettre en

marche pour l’église, elle soupire, pleure, refuse de sortir. Tous ses

parents essayent de la consoler,’ &c.

P. 149: ‘Rien ne donne une idée plus touchante du caractère du peuple

russe que ces paroles de regret et de douleur que la jeune fiancée

adresse à ses parents au milieu des joyeux préparatifs de la fête

nuptiale.’

[281] Marmier, i. 127, 229.

[282] Cranz, i. 151.

[283] _Ibid._, i. 146.

[284] Egede, pp. 143-145.

[285] Chambers, _Book of Days_, ii. 721.

[286] Holderness, p. 234.

[287] Dall, _Alaska_, pp. 396, 399.

[288] Kolbe, in Medley’s translation, i. 161.

[289] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 303.

[290] Elphinstone, _Caubul_, i. 240.

[291] Latham, _Descriptive Ethnology_, i. 313.

[292] Herberstein, i. 92.

[293] Pinkerton, _Modern Geography_, ii. 524.

[294] Seemann, _Mission to Fiji_, p. 190.

[295] Si J. Lubbock, _Origin of Civilization_, pp. 75-76.

[296] Dalton, _Bengal_, p. 193.

[297] Williams, _Fiji_, p. 136.

[298] Chambers, _Book of Days_, ii. 733; Holman, _Travels_, i. 153.

[299] Dall, _Alaska_, p. 415.

[300] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, i. 98.

[301] Krashenninonikov, _Kamtshatka_, p. 215.

[302] ‘Beschwerte sich aber die Braut, dass sie den Brautigam durchaus

nicht haben noch sich von ihm erobern lassen wollte, so musste er aus dem

Ostrog fort.’—Steller, _Kamtschatka_, p. 345.

[303] Lesseps, _Travels in Kamtschatka_ (translated), ii. 93. The account

here given of the Kamschadal marriage customs is from Krashenninonikov

(translated by Grieve), _Travels in Kamtshatka_, pp. 212-214 (1764);

Steller, pp. 343-349 (1774); Lesseps, ii. 93 (1790). They differ in some

minor details.

[304] Burchell, ii. 56.

[305] Burckhardt, _Notes on the Bedouins_, p. 200.

[306] Leslie, pp. 117, 196.

[307] Burckhardt, _Notes_, p. 151.

[308] Lane, _Modern Egyptians_, i. 217.

[309] Gaya, _Marriage Ceremonies_ (pp. 30, 48, 81), for similar old

customs, interpreted in the same way, formerly in vogue in France,

Germany, and Turkey.

[310] Astley, _Collection of Voyages_, ii. 240, 273. It is a common rule

of etiquette that, when a proposal of marriage is made, the purport

of the visit shall only be approached indirectly and cursorily. It is

curious to find such a rule among the Red Indians (_Algic Researches_,

ii. 24; i. 130), the Kafirs (Maclean, p. 47), the Esquimaux (Cranz, i.

146), even the Hottentots (Kolbe, i. 149).

[311] Pinkerton, vii. 34.

[312] Bancroft, _Native Races_, &c., i. 389.

[313] _Ibid._, i. 436.

[314] _Ibid._, i. 512.

[315] Fitzroy, _Voyage of ‘Beagle,’_ ii. 152.

[316] Compare Bowen’s _Central Africa_, pp. 303-304; Gray’s _Travels in

South Africa_, p. 56; Pinkerton, xvi. 568-569; and Bancroft, i. 66.

[317] Bowen, p. 104.

[318] Pinkerton, xvi. 873.

[319] Lichtenstein, i. 263.

[320] Thus Bonwick mentions a custom whereby a woman ‘was allowed some

chance in her life-settlement. The applicant for her hand was permitted

on a certain day to _run_ for her;’ if she passed three appointed trees

without being caught she was free.—_Daily Life, &c._, p. 70.

[321] It is also an old custom in Finland, that, when a suitor tells a

girl he has settled matters with her parents, she should ask him what he

has given, and then, declaring it to be too little, should proceed to run

away from him.—_Marmier_, i. 176.

[322] Delano, _Life on the Plains_, p. 346. In _Notes and Queries_, 1861,

vol. xii. 414, it is said that in Wales a girl would often escape a

disliked suitor through the custom of the pursuit on horseback—by taking

a line of country of her own.

[323] Dalton, _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_, pp. 16, 194, 234, 252,

319.

[324] Bates, _Naturalist on the River Amazon_, p. 382.

[325] Marsden, _Sumatra_, p. 269.

[326] Denham, _Discoveries in Africa_, i. 32-35.

[327] Dobritzhoffer, ii. 97.

[328] Wuttke, _Heidenthum_, i. 185. ‘Die Guanas in Amerika begraben ihre

Kinder lebendig, besonders die Mädchen, um diese _seltner und gesuchter

zu machen_.’

[329] Dalton, p. 192.

[330] Colonel Dalton, in _Trans. Eth. Soc._, vi. 27.

[331] Elphinstone, _Cabul_, i. 239; ii. 23.

[332] Burnes, _Travels to Bokhara_, iii. 47.

[333] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, iii. 348-351, in Oldfield’s _Aborigines of

Australia_, 1864.

[334] Bonwick, pp. 65-68.

[335] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, ii. 159.

[336] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, i. 96.

[337] Campbell, _Indian Journal_, 142.

[338] _Journal of Anthropology_ (July 1870), p. 33; _Trans. Eth. Soc._,

vii. 236, 242.

[339] Buchanan, _Travels_, i. 251, 273, 321, 358, 394; iii. 100.

[340] Sproat, p. 98.

[341] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 545.

[342] Bancroft, _Native Races_, i. 109, 132.

[343] Macpherson, 65.

[344] Collins (1796), _New South Wales_, 362, 351-3.

[345] Hunter (1790), _Voyage to New South Wales_, 62, 494.

[346] _Trans. Eth. Soc._, i. 217-8, and compare Sir G. Grey, _Travels,

&c._, ii. 224.

[347] Hunter, 466, 479.

[348] Lecky, _Hist. of England in Eighteenth Century_, ii. 366.

[349] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 60.

[350] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 545. ‘Ils ne prenaient pour femmes

légitimes que leurs cousines, qui leur étoyent aquises de droit naturel.’

Compare Burckhardt’s _Notes on the Bedouins_, 64: ‘A man has an exclusive

right to the hand of his cousin;’ not that he was obliged to marry her,

but without his consent she could marry no one else.’

[351] Rochefort, _Les Îles Antilles_, 460. ‘Il est à remarquer que les

Caraibes du continent, hommes et femmes, parlent un même langage, n’ayant

point corrumpu leur langue naturelle par des mariages avec des femmes

étrangères.’ (1511.)

[352] Humboldt, personal narrative, vi. 40-43.

[353] See chapter on Carib language in _Les Îles Antilles_, 449, and

collection of words, where those used exclusively by either sex are

marked with an H and F (_Hommes et Femmes_) respectively.

[354] Maclean, 95.

[355] Leslie, 177.

[356] Du Tertre, _Hist. Gén. des Antilles_, 378.

[357] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, i. 301-3.

[358] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 188, 206. The author

suggestively calls attention to the similarity of this legend to the

Hindu legend of Indra, who delivers the lovely Apas from the monster

Vitra in the dark cavern of Ahi, a legend which has been taken to mean

the fire-god who destroys the dark storm cloud that chases and maltreats

the fleecy maidens of the sky.

[359] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, 67.

[360] Bleek, _Bushman Folk-lore_.

[361] Egede, 209.

[362] Cranz, i. 213.

[363] Gill, 40-2.

[364] Dall, _Alaska_.

[365] Sproat, p. 182.

[366] Casalis, _Les Basutos_. With this story Grimm compares a German

one, _Kinder und Hausmärchen_, i. 172.

[367] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, ii. 229-30.

[368] Gill, 88-98.

[369] Mrs. Cookson, _Legends of the Manx_, 27-30.

[370] Wolf, _Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie_, i. 2.

[371] _Algic Researches_, ii. 216.

[372] Kelly, _Indo-European Traditions_, 78. See the German version of

the tale in Grimm’s _Hausmärchen_, ii. 394.

[373] Köhler, _Weimarische Beiträge zur Literatur_, Jan. 1865.

[374] Schirren, _Wandersagen der Neuseeländer_, 31, 37-39.

[375] Grimm, _Hausmärchen_, i. Pref. 53.

[376] See the different versions in Mr. Tylor’s _Early History of

Mankind_, 344.

[377] Cox, _Aryan Mythology_, ii. 173.

[378] _Algic Researches_, ii. 1-33.

[379] _Aryan Mythology_, ii. 85.

[380] _Algic Researches_, ii. 34.

[381] Wilson, _Vishnu Purana_, 394-5.

[382] Fiske, _Myths and Myth Makers_, 97, and Cox, _Aryan Mythology_, ii.

282.

[383] _Transactions of Ethnological Society_, ii. 27.

[384] _Algic Researches_, i. 67.

[385] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, Pref. xxv.

[386] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 148.

[387] _Algic Researches_, ii. 40.

[388] _Travels in Australia_, i. 261.

[389] Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, i. 41.

[390] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 409.

[391] D. Leslie, _Among the Zulus_, 168.

[392] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, Part i. 5.

[393] _Algic Researches_, i. 122-8.

[394] Bancroft, _Native Races_, iii. 526.

[395] Bonwick, _Daily Life of the Tasmanians_, 182.

[396] Callaway, _Religious System of the Amazulu_, Part i. 122-3.

[397] Pinkerton, xvi. 689.

[398] Callaway, _Zulu Nursery Tales_, i. 152.

[399] Leslie, 81, 98.

[400] _Ibid._ 79.

[401] _Ibid._ 169.

[402] Appleyard, _Kafir Grammar_, 13.

[403] Mrs. Cookson, _Legends of the Manx_, 23.

[404] Prof. Max Müller, _Science of Language_, ii. 444.

[405] Steller, 253-4.

[406] Léouzon le Duc, _La Finlande_, 51, 87. ‘À dire vrai, _tous les

dieux de la mythologie finnoise ne sont que les magiciens_.’

[407] Bancroft, v. 23.

[408] Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, 164.

[409] Vishnu Purana, 575.

[410] Schirren, 144. Maui wird im Meere geformt, von einem Fisch

verschluckt, mit diesem ans Land geworfen und herausgeschnitten. _Der

Fisch ist die Erde welche die Sonne zur Nacht verschlingt; der Himmel im

Osten befreit die Sonne aus der Erde._

[411] Bancroft, v. 23.

[412] Brinton, 180.

[413] Waitz (_Anthropologie_, iv. 394, 448, 455) adopts the view of the

human origin of Viracocha.

[414] Bleek, _Hottentot Fables_, 75.

[415] Schiefner, _Kalewala_, 129. In the lamentations over an approaching

marriage, an old man says to the bride:

‘_Seinen Mond nannt’ dich der Vater,_

_Sonnenschein nannt’ dich die Mutter,_

_Wasserschimmer dich der Bruder,_’ &c.

[416] Fiske, 35, 76.

[417] Schweinfurth, _Heart of Africa_, ii. 326.

[418] Steller, 279.

[419] Williams, _Fiji_, 204.

[420] Rink, _Tales, &c. of the Esquimaux_, 90.

[421] _Algic Researches_, ii. 226.

[422] _Hiawatha_, Canto xxi.

[423] Steller, 267. ‘Die Italmanes geben nach ihrer _ungemein lebhaften

Phantasie_ von allen Dingen Raison, und lassen nicht das geringste ohne

Critic vorbei.’ Yet they had neither reverence nor names for the stars,

calling only the Great Bear the moving star, 281.

[424] _Travels in Australia_, i. 261, 297.

[425] Thompson, _South Africa_, ii. 34.

[426] Aubrey’s _Miscellanies_, 197.

[427] Those who doubt the existence of much popular superstition in this

century may judge of the amount and value of the evidence by referring

to the following books: 1. All the volumes of _Notes and Queries_,

Index, Folk-Lore. 2. Harland and Wilkinson, _Lancashire Folk-Lore_,

1867. 3. Henderson’s _Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of

England and the Borders_, 1866. 4. Kelly’s _Curiosities of Indo-European

Tradition and Folk-Lore_, 1863. 5. Stewart’s _Popular Superstitions of

the Highlanders of Scotland_, 1851. 6. Sternberg’s _Dialect and Folk-Lore

of Northamptonshire_, 1851. 7. Thorpe’s _Northern Mythology_, 1851. 8.

Birlinger, _Volksthümliches aus Schwaben_, 1861. 9. Koehler, _Volksbrauch

im Voigtlande_, 1867. 10. Bosquet, _La Normandie Romanesque_, 1845.

[428] _Origin of Civilisation_, 33.

[429] _Ibid._, 23.

[430] Hammerton, _Round my House_, 254.

[431] Holderness, _Journey from Riga to the Crimea_, 254.

[432] Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, ‘Aberglaube,’ cases 576, 664, 698,

898. These practices, even if no longer existent, throw light upon those

that still are.

[433] Amélie Bosquet, _La Normandie pittoresque_, 217.

[434] Fletcher, _Russe Commonweal_, 78.

[435] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 419.

[436] Kane, 216.

[437] Williams, 248.

[438] Brett, _Indian Tribes of Guiana_, 369.

[439] Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, 111-114.

[440] Cook, vi. 192.

[441] Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_, ii. 328.

[442] There are several derivations for Beltane or Bealteine: 1. From

Baal or Belus, the Phœnician god, the worship being supposed to be

of Phœnician origin; 2. from Baldur, one of the gods of Valhalla who

represented the Sun; 3. from lá = day, teine = fire, and Beal = the name

of some god, but not Belus; 4. from Paleteine, Pales’ fire, the worship

being identified with that of the Roman goddess Pales, who presided over

cattle and pastures, and to whom, on April 21, prayers and offerings were

made. At the Palilia shepherds purified their flocks by sulphur and fires

of olive and pine wood, and presented the goddess with cakes of millet

and milk, whilst the people leaped thrice through straw fires kindled

in a row. Yet we should probably be right if we connected the Palilia

and the Beltanes, not as directly borrowed one from the other, but as

co-descendants from one and the same origin.

Mr. Forbes-Leslie speaks of Beltane fires as still to be seen in 1865.

The Beltane feast proper was on May-day, but the word was also applied to

fires kindled in honour of Bel on other days, as on Midsummer Eve, All

Hallow-e’en, and Yeule, now Christmas. (_Early Races of Scotland_, i.

120-1.)

[443] Stewart, _Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders_, p. 149.

[444] Bancroft, iii. 701.

[445] Kolbe, _Caput bonæ Spei_, ii. 431-2, and Thunberg, in Pinkerton,

xvi. 143. Kolbe gives a picture of the practice.

[446] Kerr, _Voyages_, i. 131.

[447] Catlin, ii. 189.

[448] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, iii. 228.

[449] Latham, _Desc. Ethn._, i. 141.

[450] Jones, _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 21, and

Schoolcraft, _I.T._, v. 267.

[451] _Lancashire Folk-Lore_, p. 63.

[452] Sir W. Betham, _Gael and Cimbri_: 1834. ‘The branches of a tree

near the Stone of Fire Temple in the Persian province of Fars were found

thickly hung with rags, and the same offerings are common on bushes round

sacred wells in the Dekkan of India and Ceylon.’ (Forbes-Leslie, _Early

Races of Scotland_, i. 163.)

[453] Schiefner, _Introduction to Sjögren’s Livische Grammatik_. St.

Petersburg, 1861.

[454] The instances of Esthonian superstitions are taken from Grimm’s

collection in the _Deutsche Mythologie_. Their date is 1788. The same

interest attaches to them from an archæological point of view, whether

they exist still or have become extinct.

THE END.