sliteration are considered, and
above all the frequent total ignorance of the past history and changes
the different words compared must have gone through since the time when
by any possibility a physical transmission from one locality to the
other could have taken place. These ought to be commonplaces of
research, but it is to be feared that they have not quite yet become
so.[42-*] There is no need to give instances of such false analogies
which have served as the bases for a multitude of filiation theories,
all equally well "supported" by details, and all mutually exclusive. Nor
on the other hand can we deny the existence actually of a very great
number of resemblances and identities which cannot be ignored, but must
imply connexions of some kind. The English nation is not a Hebrew people
because it had a prime minister Disraeli, nor Greeks because they have a
Queen Alexandra, nor Romans because of certain local names. Such facts
even when real, and established as such, may only be evidence of a
single continental culture or transcontinental intercourse.

It has been the dictum of a certain school of archaeology, still very
much in general favor, that all these identities are to be explained as
the natural result of the innate tendencies of untutored men, on their
evolutionary rise, at certain cultural stages, to imagine the same myths
and invent the same rites. From this as a principle I wholly dissent; it
simply does not meet the facts. There are of course many facts to which
it does apply, such as those that both Chinese and Americans made paper,
tanned leather, made feather ornaments, used star and flower names for
their children, and so on: facts which had been used to prove Chinese
and American identity, and to which Dr. Brinton justly added in retort
that they also slept at night, wore clothes when it was cold, and so on.
But there is a very great number of facts, a number constantly growing
with research, which cannot be so dismissed. Such are the employment of
abstract symbolism, the erection of great structures all having a
definite and identical astronomical bearing and evident use, the common
possession of so-called myths all telling the one story, and only
slightly modified locally, such as the birth-stories of Huitzilopochtli
and of Herakles, and the stories of the travail of Latona pursued by the
Python and of the Woman clothed with the Sun in _Revelation_; or the
universal tradition of seven ancestral c