vents--for example, in Samoa. {200}

When Mr. Lane was living at Cairo, and translating the 'Arabian Nights,'
he found that the people still believed in metamorphosis. Any day, just
as in the 'Arabian Nights,' a man might find himself turned by an
enchanter into a pig or a horse. Similar beliefs, not derived from
language, supply the matter of the senseless incidents in Greek myths.

Savage mythology is also full of metamorphoses. Therefore the
mythologists whose case we are stating, when they find identical
metamorphoses in the classical mythologies, conjecture that these were
first invented when the ancestors of the Aryans were in the imaginative
condition in which a score of rude races are to-day. This explanation
they apply to many other irrational elements in mythology. They do not
say, 'Something like the events narrated in these stories once occurred,'
nor 'A disease of language caused the belief in such events,' but 'These
stories were invented when men were capable of believing in their
occurrence as a not unusual sort of incident'

Philologists attempt to explain the metamorphoses as the result of some
oblivion and confusion of language. Apollo, they say, was called the
'wolf-god' (Lukeios) by accident: his name really meant the 'god of
light.' A similar confusion made the 'seven shiners' into the 'seven
bears.' {201} These explanations are distrusted, partly because the area
to be covered by them is so vast. There is scarcely a star, tree, or
beast, but it has been a man or woman once, if we believe civilised and
savage myth. Two or three possible examples of myths originating in
forgetfulness of the meaning of words, even if admitted, do not explain
the incalculable crowd of metamorphoses. We account for these by saying
that, to the savage mind, which draws no hard and fast line between man
and nature, all such things are possible; possible enough, at least, to
be used as incidents in story. Again, as has elsewhere been shown, the
laxity of philological reasoning is often quite extraordinary; while,
lastly, philologists of the highest repute flatly contradict each other
about the meaning of the names and roots on which they agree in founding
their theory. {202a}

By way of an example of the philological method as applied to savage
mythology, we choose a book in many ways admirable, Dr. Hahn's 'Tsuni
Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi Khoi.' {202b} This book is sometimes
appealed to as a crus