urse, impossible, save where there is a common language; and
thus philology pronounces against the kinship of barbaric myths with
each other and with similar myths of the Aryan and Semitic worlds.
Similar stories told in Greece and Norway are likely to have a common
pedigree, because the persons who have preserved them in recollection
speak a common language and have inherited the same civilization. But
similar stories told in Labrador and South Africa are not likely to
be genealogically related, because it is altogether probable that the
Esquimaux and the Zulu had acquired their present race characteristics
before either of them possessed a language or a culture sufficient
for the production of myths. According to the nature and extent of the
similarity, it must be decided whether such stories have been carried
about from one part of the world to another, or have been independently
originated in many different places.

Here the methods of philology suggest a rule which will often be found
useful. In comparing, the vocabularies of different languages, those
words which directly imitate natural sounds--such as whiz, crash,
crackle--are not admitted as evidence of kinship between the languages
in which they occur. Resemblances between such words are obviously no
proof of a common ancestry; and they are often met with in languages
which have demonstrably had no connection with each other. So in
mythology, where we find two stories of which the primitive character is
perfectly transparent, we need have no difficulty in supposing them to
have originated independently. The myth of Jack and his Beanstalk is
found all over the world; but the idea of a country above the sky, to
which persons might gain access by climbing, is one which could hardly
fail to occur to every barbarian. Among the American tribes, as well
as among the Aryans, the rainbow and the Milky-Way have contributed the
idea of a Bridge of the Dead, over which souls must pass on the way to
the other world. In South Africa, as well as in Germany, the habits of
the fox and of his brother the jackal have given rise to fables in which
brute force is overcome by cunning. In many parts of the world we find
curiously similar stories devised to account for the stumpy tails of the
bear and hyaena, the hairless tail of the rat, and the blindness of
the mole. And in all countries may be found the beliefs that men may be
changed into beasts, or plants, or stones; that the sun