Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 1 (Greek and Roman).djvu/15



HERE are many good books on the mythology of particular peoples or races, ancient and modern, and much material accessible in books of travel and works on ethnology and religion; for classical antiquity excellent dictionaries of mythology exist. There are also books of narrower or wider range on comparative mythology, besides many in which myth and custom have been pressed into the service of theories of society, civilization, and religion, or are adduced for the illustration of art and archaeology. But a comprehensive collection by competent scholars of myths from all quarters of the earth and all ages has not hitherto been attempted; for several important parts of the field, no satisfactory works exist in English, while in some there is none in any language. On the value of an undertaking like the Mythology of All Races, therefore, no words need be spent.

The intrinsic interest of the subject is very great; for better than almost anything else myths reveal men's first notions about their world and the powers at work in it, and the relations between men and those powers. They show what things in their surroundings early engaged men's attention; what things seemed to them to need explanation; and how they explained them.

For a myth is commonly an explanation of something, in the form of a story—what happened once upon a time, or what repeats itself from day to day—and in natural myths, as distinct from the invented myths of philosophers and poets, the story is not the artificial vesture of an idea but its spontaneous expression, not a fiction but a self-evident fact. The student of the mind of man in its uniformity and its