at these fireside
tales have been handed down from parent to child for more than a hundred
generations; that the primitive Aryan cottager, as he took his evening
meal of yava and sipped his fermented mead, listened with his children
to the stories of Boots and Cinderella and the Master Thief, in the days
when the squat Laplander was master of Europe and the dark-skinned Sudra
was as yet unmolested in the Punjab. Only such community of origin
can explain the community in character between the stories told by the
Aryan's descendants, from the jungles of Ceylon to the highlands of
Scotland.

This conclusion essentially modifies our view of the origin and growth
of a legend like that of William Tell. The case of the Tell legend is
radically different from the case of the blindness of Belisarius or
the burning of the Alexandrian library by order of Omar. The latter are
isolated stories or beliefs; the former is one of a family of stories or
beliefs. The latter are untrustworthy traditions of doubtful events; but
in dealing with the former, we are face to face with a MYTH.

What, then, is a myth? The theory of Euhemeros, which was so fashionable
a century ago, in the days of the Abbe Banier, has long since been so
utterly abandoned that to refute it now is but to slay the slain. The
peculiarity of this theory was that it cut away all the extraordinary
features of a given myth, wherein dwelt its inmost significance, and to
the dull and useless residuum accorded the dignity of primeval history.
In this way the myth was lost without compensation, and the student,
in seeking good digestible bread, found but the hardest of pebbles.
Considered merely as a pretty story, the legend of the golden fruit
watched by the dragon in the garden of the Hesperides is not without its
value. But what merit can there be in the gratuitous statement which,
degrading the grand Doric hero to a level with any vulgar fruit-stealer,
makes Herakles break a close with force and arms, and carry off a crop
of oranges which had been guarded by mastiffs? It is still worse when
we come to the more homely folk-lore with which the student of mythology
now has to deal. The theories of Banier, which limped and stumbled
awkwardly enough when it was only a question of Hermes and Minos and
Odin, have fallen never to rise again since the problems of Punchkin
and Cinderella and the Blue Belt have begun to demand solution.
The conclusion has been gradually forced upon