fire came from, why a constellation is grouped in one
way or another, why his race of men differs from the whites--in all
these, and in all other intellectual perplexities, the savage invents a
story to solve the problem. Stories about the Origin of Death are,
therefore, among the commonest fruits of the savage imagination. As
those legends have been produced to meet the same want by persons in a
very similar mental condition, it inevitably follows that they all
resemble each other with considerable closeness. We need not conclude
that all the myths we are about to examine came from a single original
source, or were handed about--with flint arrow-heads, seeds, shells,
beads, and weapons--in the course of savage commerce. Borrowing of this
sort may--or, rather, must--explain many difficulties as to the diffusion
of some myths. But the myths with which we are concerned now, the myths
of the Origin of Death, might easily have been separately developed by
simple and ignorant men seeking to discover an answer to the same
problem.

Why Men are Mortal

The myths of the Origin of Death fall into a few categories. In many
legends of the lower races men are said to have become subject to
mortality because they infringed some mystic prohibition or taboo of the
sort which is common among untutored peoples. The apparently
untrammelled Polynesian, or Australian, or African, is really the slave
of countless traditions, which forbid him to eat this object or to touch
that, or to speak to such and such a person, or to utter this or that
word. Races in this curious state of ceremonial subjection often account
for death as the punishment imposed for breaking some taboo. In other
cases, death is said to have been caused by a sin of omission, not of
commission. People who have a complicated and minute ritual (like so
many of the lower races) persuade themselves that Death burst on the
world when some passage of the ritual was first omitted, or when some
custom was first infringed. Yet again, Death is fabled to have first
claimed us for his victims in consequence of the erroneous delivery of a
favourable message from some powerful supernatural being, or because of
the failure of some enterprise which would have resulted in the overthrow
of Death, or by virtue of a pact or covenant between Death and the gods.
Thus it will be seen that death is often (though by no means invariably)
the penalty of infringing a command, or of