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xxii impressive. Nevertheless, universal borrowing is a difficult hypothesis, for innumerable instances show an identity of Old-World and New-World ideas, where communication within thinkable time is incredible. Even in the New World there are wide separations for identical notions that seem to imply distinct origins. Thus the Arctic Highlanders, who have only recently learned that there are other peoples in the world, possess ideas identical with those of the Indians of the far South. When such an idea is simply that there is a cavernous underworld which is an abode of spirits, there is no need to assume communication, for the notion is world-wide; but when the two regions agree in asserting that there are four underworld caverns an—idea which is in no sense a natural inference—then the suspicion of communication becomes inevitable. Again, constellation-myths which see in Corona Borealis a circle of chieftains, in the Pleiades a group of dancers, in Ursa Major a quadruped pursued by three hunters, might have many independent origins; but when we encounter so curious a story as that of the incestuous relations of the Sun and the Moon told by Eskimo in the north and Cherokee in the south, communication is again suggested; and this suggestion becomes almost certainty when we find, further, that a special incident of this myth—the daubing of the secret lover with paint or ashes by which he is later identified—appears in another tale found in nearly every part of the continent, the story of the girl who bore children to a dog.

In the story just mentioned the children of the girl and the dog sometimes become stars, sometimes the ancestors of a tribe or clan of men; and this is a fair illustration of the manner in which incidents having all the character of fiction are made to serve as explanatory myths by their various users. The fundamental material of myth is rather a collection of incidents fitted into the scheme of things suggested by perception and habit than the stark invention of nature; and while the incidents must have an invention somewhere, the greater portion