Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/28

xviii fire can best be kindled. A third motive is our universally human curiosity: we desire to know the causes of things, whether they be the forces that underlie recurrent phenomena or the seeming purposes that mark the beginnings and govern the course of history. Myths that detail causes are science in infancy, and they are perhaps the only stories that may properly be called myths. They may be simply fanciful explanations of the origin of animal traits—telling why the dog's nose is cold or why the robin's breast is red; and then we have the beast fable. They may be no less fanciful accounts of the institution of some rite or custom whose sanction is deeper than reason; and we have the so-called aetiological myth. They may be semi-historical reminiscences of the inauguration of new ways of life, of the conquest of fire or the introduction of maize by mythical wise men; or they may portray recoverable tribal histories through the distorted perspective of legend. In the most significant group of all, they seek to conceptualize the beginnings of all things in those cosmogonic allegories of which the nebular hypothesis is only the most recently outgrown example.

Stories which satisfy curiosity about causes are true myths. With this criterion it should perhaps seem an easy task for the student to separate mythology from fiction, and to select or reject from his materials. But the thing is not so simple. Human motives, in whatever grade of society, are seldom unmixed; it is much easier to analyze them in kind than to distinguish them in example. Take such a theme as the well-nigh universally North American account of the origin of death. On the face of it, it is a causal explanation; but in very many examples it is a moral tale, while in not a few instances both the scientific and the moral interest disappear before the aesthetic. In a Wikeno story death came into the world by the will of a little bird,—"How should I nest me in your warm graves if ye men live forever?"—and however grim the fancy, it is difficult to see anything but art in its motive; but in the