ading roles, and the fire-stealing
bird or beast is found among many widely scattered races. In Normandy
the wren is the fire-bringer. {196c} A bird brings fire in the Andaman
Isles. {196d} Among the Ahts a fish owned fire; other beasts stole it.
The raven hero of the Thlinkeets, Yehl, stole fire. Among the Cahrocs
two old women possessed it, and it was stolen by the coyote. Are these
theftuous birds and beasts to be explained as Fire-gods? Probably not.
Will any philologist aver that in Cahroc, Thlinkeet. Australian,
Andaman, and so forth, the word for 'rub' resembled the word for 'rob,'
and so produced by 'a disease of language' the myth of the Fire-stealer?

Origin of the Myth of Fire-stealing

The myth arose from the nature of savage ideas, not from unconscious
puns. Even in a race so civilised as the Homeric Greeks, to make fire
was no easy task. Homer speaks of a man, in a lonely upland hut, who
carefully keeps the embers alive, that he may not have to go far afield
in search of the seed of fire. {197} Obviously he had no ready means of
striking a light. Suppose, then, that an early savage loses his seed of
fire. His nearest neighbours, far enough off, may be hostile. If he
wants fire, as they will not give it, he must _steal_ it, just as he must
steal a wife. People in this condition would readily believe, like the
Australian blacks, that the original discoverers or possessors of a
secret so valuable as fire would not give it away, that others who wanted
it would be obliged to get it by theft. In Greece, in a civilised race,
this very natural old idea survives, though fire is not the possession of
a crane, or of an old woman, but of the gods, and is stolen, not by a
hawk or a coyote, but by Prometheus, the culture-hero and demiurge.
Whether his name 'Foresighted' is a mistaken folk-etymology from the root
manth, or not, we have, in the ancient inevitable idea, that the original
patentees of fire would not willingly part with their treasure, the
obvious origin of the myth of the Fire-stealer. And this theory does not
leave the analogous savage myths of fire-stealing unexplained and out in
the cold, as does the philological hypothesis. {198} In this last
instance, as in others, the origin of a world-wide myth is found, not in
a 'disease of language,' but in a form of thought still natural. If a
foreign power wants what answers among us to the exclusive possession of
fire, or wants the secret