er back
again. Then after only three days, man came back to
him again and said: Lord, I know not how it is; but
after all I have come to the conclusion that she is
more of a trouble than a pleasure to me; so please
take her back again. But Twashtri said: Out on you! Be
off! I will have no more of this. You must manage how
you can. Then man said: But I cannot live with her.
And Twashtri replied: Neither could you live without
her. And he turned his back on man, and went on with
his work. Then man said: What is to be done? for I
cannot live either with her or without her.'"[189]

Now this myth has, so far as its central fact is concerned, its
counterpart in Celtic folklore. In the Welsh Mabinogi of Math, son of
Mathonwy, it is related how Arianrod laid a destiny upon her son, whom
she would not recognise, that he should never have a wife of the race
that now inhabits the earth, and how Gwydion declared that he should
have a wife notwithstanding. "They went thereupon unto Math, the son
of Mathonwy, and complained unto him most bitterly of Arianrod. Well,
said Math, we will seek, I and thou, by charms and magic, to form a
wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and
the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and
produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man
ever saw." No one can doubt that this interesting fragment of Welsh
tradition takes us back to a creation legend of the same order as the
Indian legend, and that the two widely separated parallels belong to
the period when men were carving out for themselves theories as to the
origin of women in relation to men.

It is impossible to deny a place among these myths of creation to the
Hebrew tradition of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first
chapter of Genesis is the answer which the early Hebrews gave to the
scientific question as to the origin of man. How much it cost them to
arrive at this conclusion one cannot guess, one only knows that it has
become a glory to the ages of Hebrew history, as well as to the
civilisation of Christianity. Unfortunately it has become much more.
The science of the primitive Hebrew has been adopted as the God-given
revelation to all mankind. It is the function of folklore to correct
this error, to restore the Hebrew tradition to its proper place among
the myths of the world which have answered the