Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/365

 Animal Myths and their Origin.

��ANIMAL MYTHS AND THEIR ORIGIN. 1

The embryonic stages of man sketch his race origin with impres- sionistic truthfulness in regard to the chief outlines, if not with pho- tographic accuracy as to all the details. So in the development of the individual mind appear the hereditary vestiges left from the past mental evolution of the race. Since we no longer divorce the mind from the body in working out the descent of man, but recognize the common brotherhood of protoplasm in whatever form it may exist, we know to-day even better than our primitive ancestors guessed our kinship to the plants and animals about us.

The child holds communion with every living thing in his back- yard world. The same voices speak to him in the dawn of the twentieth century a. d., as spoke to his cave-dwelling ancestors in the twilight of the twentieth century b. c. To the child the sym- pathetic wind moans with anguish over some painful cut or bruise or sighs its sad life away in unison with the sobs from his broken heart. The lily gives him its perfume distilled by the fairies who work deep down under the golden dusted anthers, and the song of the wood thrush bears to him a message which no one else may hear or know. When as a child I lay stretched out on the ground watch- ing the ants of my own particular colony in their endless marching to and fro, their varied industries in times of peace, and their re- markable valor and extraordinary strategy in times of war, these insects became to me the ant-people.

If in those days I had read Ovid I should have believed him implicitly when he tells us 2 that in days of old Jupiter transformed the ants in an old oak-tree into the Myrmidons, — that "thrifty race, patient of toil." As Ovid relates, the ants "suddenly grew, and seemed greater and greater, and raised themselves from the ground, and stood with their bodies upright; and laid aside their leanness, and the former number of their feet, and their sable hue, and as- sumed in their limbs the human shape."

So after all these centuries, in the broad sunlight of modern life, the miracles of transformation believed by the ancients are effected again in the imagination of childhood. In order to test this well- known phenomenon in a surer way than through memory, which so soon grows old, I asked my boy John to tell me what he sees in the clouds and trees, and these are the words of his answer : " Once in a while I imagine that I see forms in the clouds and trees.

1 Address delivered at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the American Folk- Lore Society, New Haven, Conn., December 28, 1899.

2 Book vii. fable 6.

vol. xni. — no. 43. 3

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