Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/105

Rh the incidents of his life to a series of solar myths. It is, however, only on the theory of a religious schism that the fact that the deities of Brahmanism are the devils of Zoroastrianism, and vice versa, can be adequately explained. To assert that this antagonism is the result of an "accidental selection" of gods is no explanation at all. The religious history of mankind is not a record of casualties or mere chapter of accidents.

Besides, we have a modern example of a similar enmity growing out of the transition from nomadic to sedentary life in the mythology of the Dards, who are, perhaps, one of the oldest races and most primitive peoples of the East, and who believe in the existence of demons called yatsh (bad), which, like the Homeric Cyclops (the barbarous aborigines of the Sicilian coast), are of gigantic stature, and have only one eye, set in the middle of their forehead. These demons haunt the mountains and the wilderness, and are exceedingly hostile to agriculturists, whom they vex and harm in every possible manner, stealing and destroying the crops, and even carrying off the husbandmen to their gloomy caverns. In this scrap of mythology we have the survival of the old strife between barbarism and civilization, which began with man's first efforts to improve his condition.

The barbarian is, in fact, the most uncompromising incarnation and typical representative of conservatism; and it is the survival of the barbarian temper of mind that constantly hampers progress and hinders reform in modern times. His daily life is the dullest routine and would be unbearable, were it not the outcome and expression of the general rigidity and sterility of his intellect. He treads religiously in the footsteps of his forefathers, generation after generation, the whole mass moving on bodily and mentally in single file, as is the custom with savages. He is the stubborn foe of all innovations, and punishes as treason against the tribe every deviation from the beaten trail. Under such circumstances no social transformation can be effected without fierce battle and bloodshed. In the primitive history of mankind, as in the early physical history of the globe, great changes are uniformly the result of great convulsions.

It is not merely the love of booty that leads nomadic tribes to attack and lay waste the permanent settlements of husbandmen, but the instinct of self-preservation resisting the encroachments of a new form of social organization which imperils the old. For this reason hunters are hostile to herdsmen, and herdsmen to tillers of the soil; since pasturage diminishes the extent and value of hunting grounds, and agriculture diminishes the area of pasturage.

Mr. D. Mackenzie Wallace gives a striking illustration of this antagonism in the history of the Cossacks of the Don, who, so