Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/388

378 the introduction of iron-smelting in a part of the great Malayo-Polynesian district, and belongs to that particular group of islands near the Eastern coast of Asia where this immense step in material civilization was made. Again, the philological re- searches of Buschmann, which have brought into view traces of the Aztec language up into the heart of North America, fifteen hundred miles and more north of the City of Mexico, join with several other lines of evidence in bringing far distant parts of the population of the continent into historical connexion, and in showing, at least, that such communication between its different peoples as may have spread the art of pottery from a single locality is not matter of mere speculation. It is in this way that it will probably be found most expedient to use fragmentary arguments from the distribution of the arts and sciences of savage tribes, in Ethnological districts where a way has been already opened by more certain methods.

In its bearing on the History of Mankind, the tendency of modern research in the region of Comparative Mythology is not to be mistaken. The number of myths recorded as found in different countries, where it is hardly conceivable that they should have grown independently, goes on steadily increasing from year to year, each one famishing a new clue by which common descent or intercourse is to be traced. Such evidence, as fast as it is brought before the public, is received with the most lively interest; and not only is its value fully admitted, but there may even be observed a tendency to use it with too much confidence in proof of common descent, without enough consideration of what we know of the way in which Mythology really travels from race to race. The cause of the occurrence of a myth, or of a whole family of myths, may be, and no doubt often is, mere intercourse, which has as little to do with common descent as the connexion which has planted the stories of the Arabian Nights among the Malays of Borneo, and the legends of Buddha among the Chinese. On the other hand, the argument from similar Customs has received, as a whole, comparatively little attention, but it is not without importance. Two or three, at least, of the customs remarked upon in the present volume, in the group including the cure by sucking,