Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/108

 (perhaps consciously and deliberately evolved during its later stages as a stupendous memoria tecnica), and the absence or rarity of books and printing, with the pernicious habit of mind they create of transferring memory from brains to paper, contributed to the development of well-stored minds, with all their knowledge, so to say, in hand, and tended to ensure the soundness of their inductions. I have said we are behind these early philosophers in one respect, and so we are. We have never yet attempted to infer the evolution of the æon from that of the year, because the analogical nexus between the two has not been shewn to be necessary. Considering the success of this method of induction among the ancients for arriving at respectably accurate conclusions, it might even now be of use, at all events for the framing of hypotheses to be afterwards the subject of analytical study, observation, and the collation of facts. However this may be, one thing is certain, that ancient traditions, beliefs and theories are far from being the despicable trash they are supposed to be by missionaries in the East, and that geologists, by a careful collation of all the traditions and notices of the ape-hero Hanuman in the Hindoo classics, might greatly facilitate their search for the remnants quaternary, or perhaps yet more ancient, of the missing link. A comparative study of the name for apes in all the languages of the world might also lead to some valuable results. The roots of many Latin words as, e.g., that of tabes and macula dim (cf.: mak), are to be found in their most primitive form in old Slavonic. Now the name of the filthy oscans was originally opisci (see Juvenal), and isco, asco, etc., means “that nasty,” while op in Sclavonic means ape; it is not unlikely, therefore, that the word opisci meant originally “those nasty monkeys,” from the likeness of the ancient oscans to apes.

If the tenacity of the memory of the men of old be doubted, I would appeal to that of the modern North Russian moujik biliny (lit.: weeds) or ballad singers, or to Homer and Hesiod, who, from not being able to read or write, could remember 50,000 lines of poetry, as well as to Herodotus, who repeated from memory a great part of his history at the Olympic games.

To return to our immediate subject—the eight primitive Slav fairy stories. From their comparison, the just conclusion seems to be that they point to having been derived from Arctic annual myths, and not from Indian Vedic solar ones, themselves more probably a derivation from the same stock, the annual myth degrading to diurnal ones, when the climatic conditions that originated them were exchanged by migration (either of the story or the story-teller), for less rigorous winters and warm summers. This theory in no way touches or impugns what has been repeatedly demonstrated, that Eastern legends and fairy stories (like the Bethgellert legend) have constantly, and from remote times, found their way into Europe, become naturalized, and extended themselves to remote regions. The very welcome that they received proves that the soil was congenial to them. They stirred memories legends long since