more powerful do they
believe them. All this might account for many details that we are told
concerning the dwarfs, the Picts, the Finns, or by whatever other names
the elvish race may have been known to Scots and Irishmen. But further
than this I cannot go with Mr. MacRitchie. I hold his error, like that
of Liebrecht already discussed, to be founded on too narrow an
induction. This volume will have been written in vain, as it appears
that for Mr. MacRitchie the vastly more important works of Dr. Tylor and
Mr. Andrew Lang have been written in vain, unless I have made it clear
that the myths of nations all over the world follow one general law and
display common characteristics. I am not astonished to find the Shetland
tale of marriage with a seal-woman reproduced on the Gold Coast and
among the Dyaks of Borneo. But Mr. MacRitchie ought to be very much
astonished; for he can hardly show that the historical Finns were known
in these out-of-the-way places. It seems to me natural to find that in
Scotland and Ireland fairies dwelt in barrows, and in Annam and Arabia
in hills and rocks; and that both in this country and in the far East
they inveigled unhappy mortals into their dwellings and kept them for
generations--nay, for centuries. That the Shoshone of California should
dread their infants being changed by the Ninumbees, or dwarfs, in the
same way as the Celts of the British Islands, and the Teutons too,
dreaded their infants being changed, does not seem at all incredible to
me. That to eat the food of the dead in New Zealand prevents a living
man from returning to the land of the living, just as Persephone was
retained in Hades by partaking of the pomegranate, and just as to eat
the food of fairies hinders the Manx or the Hebrew adventurer from
rejoining his friends on the surface of the earth, is in no way
perplexing to me. But all these things, and they might be multiplied
indefinitely, must be very perplexing to Mr. MacRitchie, if he be not
prepared to prove that Annamites and Arabs, Hebrews and Shoshone, New
Zealanders and classical Greeks alike, were acquainted with the Picts
and the Finns, and alike celebrated them in their traditions.

The truth Mr. MacRitchie does not reckon with is, that no theory will
explain the nature and origin of the fairy superstitions which does not
also explain the nature and origin of every other supernatural being
worshipped or dreaded by uncivilized mankind throughout the world. And