Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/572

568 in certain Algonquin tales, to mischief of a more or less harmless character, was a being of lofty nature, and, save for the ruder surroundings of his life, a personage quite as imposing as Arthur himself. Indeed, in the conception of each as a power for good—and this is the real essence of their natures—there is little, if any, difference.

The modern world can not but miss the drift of these stories, for the mind that conceived them belonged to the youth of a race. Men of to-day have so far forgotten this period of racial childhood (as they have forgotten their own individual childhood), have so far put behind them the childish things, that they largely fail to grasp the real meaning of these tales. It was the earliest glimmer of that racial self-consciousness that in after times found expression in self-narrated history and in religious belief. The type or mode of thought was the same in all races when they reached this crisis in their psychic development—a realization of kinship with the powers of earth and air, with the phenomena of nature, and with the life of animals and plants. Child-like efforts to account for the origin of things gave rise to those strange creation myths that exist as primitive conceptions in the history of every race and people. Delusions of judgment undoubtedly played a large part in the myth-making faculty of primitive men. They verily believed that they saw and heard strange forms, unembodied voices. They were overawed in the presence of elemental forces and, child-like, they saw in all the lineaments of nature mysterious powers, potent for good or evil. The sights and sounds of nature and the ways of animals were interpreted by them in terms of their own mode of thought. To the phenomena of cause and effect, to the haphazard circumstances of their own lives and those of their fellowmen—fortuitous and unfortuitous happenings—and to dreams, they imputed the agency of superhuman powers or magic. To this latter class of phenomena—dreams—we may attribute much of that curious recital of visits to the underworld. In the Red Swan, for example, the hero of the tale, after his return to his native village, journeys to the abodes of the dead, where he holds converse with the chief of the departed buffaloes. One can not help but be impressed, in reading this portion of the tale, with its resemblance to the visit of Odysseus to Hades.

These myths and folk stories have drifted down to us out of so remote a past that the period which they depict in the history of any group of peoples can never be certainly known. More than likely they are the embodiment of a slow subliminal growth that began with men of paleolithic culture in various parts of the earth as a result of the impress of their surroundings. At a later period, possibly in a neolithic stage of culture, as in aboriginal America, this body of impressions crystallized into the form of the myth and the folk tale. Homer depicts the Bronze Age, which was later than that of stone, and the Celtic tales are probably of this period also, but there are no means of knowing where the germ of any myth or story had its origin, for much new