he makes skill in magic a claim to distinguished rank.

Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the more
"senseless" factors in civilised mythology as "survivals" of these ideas
and customs preserved by conservatism and local tradition, or, less
probably, borrowed from races which were, or had been, savage.

(2) Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined the
mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would have
been, superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were also
existing among certain low savages.

It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account for
many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society, even in
dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages abide in these,
it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything
so closely connected as is mythology with the conservative religious
sentiment and tradition. Our object, then, is to prove that the "silly,
savage, and irrational" element in the myths of civilised peoples is,
as a rule, either a survival from the period of savagery, or has been
borrowed from savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly,
is an imitation by later poets of old savage data.(1) For example,
to explain the constellations as metamorphosed men, animals, or other
objects of terrestrial life is the habit of savages,(2)--a natural habit
among people who regard all things as on one level of personal life and
intelligence. When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India,
are also popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals
and the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the
ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition
of the Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have been
borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage or apt to
copy savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a poet of a late
age may have invented a new artificial myth on the old lines of savage
fancy.

(1) We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas which
survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each other, or
use stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers are not fully
developed, and hasty analogy from their own unreasoned consciousness
is their chief guide. Myth, in Mr. Darwin's phrase, is one of the
"miserable and indirect consequences o