Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/337

Rh their subject. Here, I think, there is definite evidence that it is not the especially familiar which becomes the subject of myth. Thus, in Melanesia, the animal which is ever present in the minds of the people, the subject of their daily, almost hourly, thought, is the pig, and yet I know of hardly a myth dealing either exclusively or mainly with this animal. It is about such features as the long tail of the rat, the red head of the rail, the thinness of one fish, and the grinning appearance of another, that myths have arisen and are still told by the people. Familiar animals may become the subject of myth when they are the object of religious ritual, as among the Todas, and myths may arise to explain exceptional features of a familiar animal, especially those which distinguish him from man, such as a wide mouth and the lack of speech, but with these exceptions I believe it to be a general rule that man has not mythologised about the domestic animals with which he is in daily contact, but rather about those he sees only occasionally, so that special features of their structure or behaviour have not a familiarity which has bred contempt and made them unfit subjects for the play of imagination.

Again, of features of land and sea, it is not the land which he clears and tills, or the haunts he visits habitually to hunt or fish, which are the subject of myth, but rather strangely shaped rocks or dangerous reefs which he sees only occasionally, and then in such a way as especially to impress the imagination, and thus become the subject of the mythic fancy.

The same principle is even more striking in the case of meteorological conditions. Myths concerning the winds are well developed in parts of the world where their direction and strength are variable and uncertain, but in such a