Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/423

 Rh into which we are inquiring. If man was created, or evolved, in several places, or if he left his one centre before he had developed the ideas of magic, of a personal and animated nature, and various odd customs, then, to my mind, many of these "details" were of independent invention. The details of Pawnee and Attic ritual (in the Bouphonia) can hardly be so similar because they were diffused, or borrowed from the old Greek, by the western world. That similarity, I think, arises from the existence of similar ideas in similar minds. Nature-myths, also, myths explanatory of the world, and myths explanatory of customs, are like each other in the remotest lands, I imagine, because similar minds were at work on similar matter: on nature, and on analogous customs.

Thus I have ever tried to explain those similarities, though imitation must also be allowed for. Thus I explain the similarity of many details in stories, they are simply examples of early belief everywhere. But the details are not the tale. The problem of stories is different; we have to account, not for similar details, but for a similar arrangement of those details. If we find a story in Samoa and in ancient Greece, with a very close resemblance in the arrangement of details, in the development of plot, then the hypothesis of diffusion, of transmission, is infinitely the more probable. This I alleged in 1884 (in Custom and Myth), when discussing the widely-spread stories akin to the Jason legend. I have often done more, I have pointed out many methods, many channels, by which a story might be diffused. In 1886, in Myth, Ritual, and Religion (ii, 320), I said: "Wherever human communication is, or has been possible, there the story may go, and the space of time during which the courses of the sea and the paths of the land have been open to story is dateless and unknown." I say much the same thing in Perrault, p. cxv (1888); and in Mrs. Hunt's Grimm, p. lxx (1884): "The diffusion of plots is much more difficult to explain" (than that of details), "nor do we