Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/420

402 quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word Guarani not being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of 'warriors' given by the missionaries to certain tribes. And when such facts are considered as that North American clans named after animals, Beaver, Crayfish, and the like, account for these names by simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors, the tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.

The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The Greek legend of the twin brothers Danaos and Ægyptos, founders of the nations of the Danaoi or Homeric Greeks and of the Ægyptians, represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic myth of Hellēn, the personified race of the Hellēnes, is another and more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great branches of the Greek race: the three sons of Hellēn, it relates, were Aiolos, Dōros, and Xouthos; the first two gave their names to the Æolians and Dorians, the third had sons called Achaios and Iōn, whose names passed as a heritage to the