this
means that we may believe a story that we find in circulation forty
years after the alleged events, it is wildly extravagant. It does
injustice to the Mythop[oe]ic Faculty of man. The period of time that
suffices for the creation of a full-blown myth, must be measured
by hours rather than by years. I will give an instance from my own
observation, if that has not been entirely discredited by my previous
confessions. The bazaars of the East are generally supposed to be
the peculiar home of myth, hotbeds in which myths grow with the most
amazing speed, but the locality of my myth is Aberdeen. In the summer
of 1887 our town set up in one of its steeples a very fine carillon
of Belgian bells. There was much public excitement over the event: the
descriptions of enthusiastic promoters had prepared us to hear silvery
music floating all over the town and filling the whole air. On the day
fixed for the inauguration, four hours after the time announced for
the first ceremonial peal, not having heard the bells, I was in a shop
and asked if anything had happened to put off the ceremony. "Yes,"
I was told; "there had been an accident; they had not been properly
hung, and when the wife of the Lord Provost had taken hold of a string
to give the first pull, the whole machinery had come down." As a
matter of fact all that had happened was that the sound of the bells
was faint, barely audible a hundred yards from the belfry, and not at
all like what had been expected. There were hundreds of people in the
streets, and the myth had originated somehow among those who had
not heard what they went out to hear. The shop where it was repeated
circumstantially to me was in the main street, not more than a quarter
of a mile from where the carillon had been played in the hearing of
a large but disappointed crowd. I could not help reflecting that if I
had been a mediaeval chronicler, I should have gone home and recorded
the story, which continued to circulate for some days in spite of
the newspapers: and two hundred years hence no historian would have
ventured to challenge the truth of the contemporary evidence.

III.--METHOD OF TESTING TRADITIONAL EVIDENCE.

It is obvious that the tests applied to descriptive testimony in
Courts of Law cannot be applied to the assertions of History. It is
a supreme canon of historical evidence that only the statements of
contemporaries can be admitted: but most even of their statements must
rest on hearsa