Here, treacherous fiend, take your sword of light!" shouted Sculloge in
tones of thunder; and as he drew it from its sheath the whole valley
was lighted up as with the morning sun, and next moment the head of the
wretched Druid was lying at his feet, and his sweet wife, who had come
to meet him, was laughing and crying in his arms. November, 1870.

V. MYTHS OF THE BARBARIC WORLD.

THE theory of mythology set forth in the four preceding papers, and
illustrated by the examination of numerous myths relating to the
lightning, the storm-wind, the clouds, and the sunlight, was originally
framed with reference solely to the mythic and legendary lore of the
Aryan world. The phonetic identity of the names of many Western gods and
heroes with the names of those Vedic divinities which are obviously
the personifications of natural phenomena, suggested the theory which
philosophical considerations had already foreshadowed in the works
of Hume and Comte, and which the exhaustive analysis of Greek, Hindu,
Keltic, and Teutonic legends has amply confirmed. Let us now, before
proceeding to the consideration of barbaric folk-lore, briefly
recapitulate the results obtained by modern scholarship working strictly
within the limits of the Aryan domain.

In the first place, it has been proved once for all that the languages
spoken by the Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Slaves, and
Teutons are all descended from a single ancestral language, the Old
Aryan, in the same sense that French, Italian, and Spanish are descended
from the Latin. And from this undisputed fact it is an inevitable
inference that these various races contain, along with other elements,
a race-element in common, due to their Aryan pedigree. That the
Indo-European races are wholly Aryan is very improbable, for in every
case the countries overrun by them were occupied by inferior races,
whose blood must have mingled in varying degrees with that of their
conquerors; but that every Indo-European people is in great part
descended from a common Aryan stock is not open to question.

In the second place, along with a common fund of moral and religious
ideas and of legal and ceremonial observances, we find these kindred
peoples possessed of a common fund of myths, superstitions, proverbs,
popular poetry, and household legends. The Hindu mother amuses her child
with fairy-tales which often correspond, even in minor incidents, with
stories in Scottish or Scandinavian nu