Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/19

 Rh alone, and proceed to examine the other elements in connection with this part of our subject.

Let us subtract scientific knowledge from our present conception of nature, and what remains to us but the story of Adam and Eve and the first chapter of Genesis? These have satisfied whole generations of our forefathers, amply satisfied them, simply because there was nothing to take their place, and because they were propounded from the pulpit, the college chair, and the schools. But the wide and universal acceptance of such a conception of natural causes is due to an important factor in the problem we are discussing, namely, the generation of similar beliefs by people at the same level of culture. If this particular form of belief had not been supplied from foreign sources* it would have been found that some other general form of belief would have been supplied from a native source; for, in the words of Mr. Clodd's eloquent apology for not including detailed references to the successive stages of the inquiry into myth, "the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the monotony of a catalogue, for, however unlike on the surface, they are fundamentally the same." Therefore, the acceptance of an outside myth by a people could never happen if such a myth did not meet a perfectly even surface of mental culture upon which to build its home. It is simply the converse of the more generally stated proposition that like conditions would generate like beliefs, and as such it helps to prove the truth of its reverse.

There is one other aspect of this branch of our subject which I want to note, because it has been attacked during the past year as almost an impossibility. Finding that in India a group of customs, peculiarly savage and at a low level of culture, obtains in Aryan villages, but at the instance and under the guidance of non-Aryan inhabitants, we have an example of the Aryans accepting this village festival as a part of the religious duties of the season borrowed from the indigenes of the land. Whether the