Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/348

338 judgment till, a little while afterwards, the mystery was unravelled by the appearance of the very missionary from whom the native story-teller had received his teaching. As another case of the same kind, may he quoted the following servile version of the story of Joseph and his brethren, found in Hawaii as the story of Waikelenuiaiku. His father had ten sons and one daughter; he was beloved by his father, and hated by his brethren, and they threw him into a pit, but his eldest brother felt more compassion for him than the rest. He escaped out of the pit, into the country of King Kamohoalii, and there he was confined in a dungeon with the prisoners. He bade his companions dream, and interpreted the dreams of four of them. One had seen a ripe banana, and his spirit ate it, the next dreamt of a banana, and the next of a hog, in the same way, but the fourth dreamt that he saw awa, that he pressed out the juice, and his spirit drank it. The three first dreams the foreigner interpreted for evil, and the dreamers were put to death in course of time, but to the fourth he prophesied deliverance and life, and he was saved, and told the King, who set Waikelenuiaiku at liberty, and made him a principal chief in the kingdom.

There is sometimes a crudeness about these tales adopted from foreign sources, which gives us the means of positively condemning them. But the power which myths have of taking root the moment they are transplanted into a new country, often makes it impossible to tell whether they are of old date and historical value, or mere modern intruders. There is reason to believe that a story carried into a distant place by civilized men may spread and accommodate itself to the circumstances of the country, so that in a very few years' time it may be quite honestly collected as a genuine native tale, even by the very people who originally introduced it, like the farmer's hack that he sold in the morning, and bought back in the afternoon with a fresh mane and tail as a new horse. Of course this is the same kind of diffusion of myths which has been going on from remote ages among mankind, one of the very