artists, the Iwaldings.

Whether we have here the phenomenon of mythological doublets belonging
to different tribes, or whether we have already among these early names
that descent of story which has led to an adventure of Moses being
attributed to Garibaldi, given to Theodoric the king the adventures
of Theodoric the god, taken Arthur to Rome, and Charles the Great to
Constantinople, it is hard to say.

The skeleton-key of identification, used even as ably as Dr. Rydberg
uses it, will not pick every mythologic lock, though it undoubtedly has
opened many hitherto closed. The truth is that man is a finite animal;
that he has a limited number of types of legend; that these legends, as
long as they live and exist, are excessively prehensile; that, like the
opossum, they can swing from tree to tree without falling; as one tree
dies out of memory they pass on to another. When they are scared away
by what is called exact intelligence from the tall forest of great
personalities, they contrive to live humbly clinging to such bare plain
stocks and poles (Tis and Jack and Cinderella) as enable them to find a
precarious perch.

To drop similitudes, we must be prepared, in unravelling our tangled
mythology, to go through several processes. We must, of course, note the
parallelisms and get back to the earliest attribution-names we can find.
But all system is of late creation, it does not begin till a certain
political stage, a stage where the myths of coalescing clans come into
contact, and an official settlement is attempted by some school of
poets or priests. Moreover, systematization is never so complete that it
effaces all the earlier state of things. Behind the official systems of
Homer and Hesiod lies the actual chaos of local faiths preserved for us
by Pausanias and other mythographers. The common factors in the various
local faiths are much the majority among the factors they each possess;
and many of these common factors are exceedingly primitive, and resolve
themselves into answers to the questions that children still ask, still
receiving no answer but myth--that is, poetic and subjective hypothesis,
containing as much truth as they can receive or their inventors can
grasp.

Who were our forbears? How did day and night, sun and moon, earth and
water, and fire come? How did the animals come? Why has the bear no
tail? Why are fishes dumb, the swallow cleft-tail? How did evil come?
Why did men begin to quarrel? How did de