Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/228



HAT Selene is the moon is, perhaps, one of the few things which even a mythologist with a theory would not venture to deny. It is therefore a testimony to the spread of folk-lore methods that even a treatise on the mythology of an acknowledged nature-goddess is unable nowadays to ignore the folk-lore of the subject. And the testimony is still more striking when the treatise in question is written by one of the straitest of the sect of meteorological mythologists. For of such we must consider Roscher to be, in spite of his protests. He protests that, if in his previous mythological studies he has found nothing but wind and weather myths, the reason simply is that wind and weather myths have accidentally happened to form the subject of his previous studies. Be this as it may, it is matter for much satisfaction that he tells us in the preface he has employed the comparative method, and has sought for parallels not only amongst peoples related to the Greeks, but also amongst peoples not related to them. Still more satisfactory is it to hear him express his "conviction that genuine folk-myths are for the most part much older than the writers who have accidentally transmitted