Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/29

Rh version known to the Arctic Highlanders, where the poignant choice is put, "Will ye have eternal darkness and eternal life, or light and death?"—art and morality and philosophy are all intermingled.

To perfect our criterion we must add to the analysis of motive the study of the sources of mythic conceptions. In a broad way, these are the suggestions of environing nature, the analogies of human nature both psychical and physiological, imagination, and borrowings. Probably the first of these is the most important, though the "nature-myth" is far from being the simple and inevitable thing an elder generation of students would make of it. Men's ideas necessarily reflect the world that they know, and even where the mythic incidents are the same the timbre of the tale will vary, say from the Yukon to the Mississippi, in the eastern forest, or on the western desert. There are physiographical boundaries within the continent which form a natural chart of the divisions in the complexion of aboriginal thought; and while there are numberless overlappings, outcroppings, and intrusions, none the less striking are the general conformities of the character of the several regions with the character of the mythic lore developed in them. The forests of the East, the Great Plains, the arid South-West, secluded California, the North-Western archipelago, each has its own traits of thought as it has its own traits of nature, and it is inevitable that we suppose the former to be in some degree a reflection of the latter. Beyond all this there are certain constancies of nature, the succession of darkness and light, the circle of the seasons, the motions of sun, moon, and stars, of rivers and winds, that affect men everywhere and everywhere colour their fancies; and it is not the least interesting feature of the study of a widespread mythic theme or incident to see the variety of natural phenomena for which it may, first and last, serve to account, since the myth-maker does not find his story in nature, but writes it there with her colouring.