Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/346

 of the whale follows. In the former group of tales the incident describing the death of Pitch is brought in, which ordinarily occurs as an independent story.

In these cases we find the same incidents in various connections, and this makes it clear that it would be quite arbitrary to assume that the incident developed as part of one story and was transferred to another one. We must infer that the elements were independent and have been combined in various ways. There certainly is nothing to prove that the connection in which an incident occurs in one story is older and nearer to the original form than one in which it occurs in another story.

The distribution of plots and incidents of North American folk-lore presents a strong contrast when compared to that found in Europe. European folk-tales, while differing in diction and local coloring, exhibit remarkable uniformity of contents. Incidents, plots, and arrangement are very much alike over a wide territory. The incidents of American lore are hardly less widely distributed; but the make-up of the stories exhibits much wider divergence, corresponding to the greater diversification of cultural types. It is evident that the integration of European cultural types has progressed much further during the last two or three thousand years than that of the American types. Cultural contrasts like those between the Northwest coast and the Plateaus, or between the Great Plains and the arid Southwest, are not easily found in Europe. Excepting a few of the most outlying regions, there is a great underlying uniformity in material culture, social organization, and beliefs, that permeates the whole European continent, and that is strongly expressed in the comparative uniformity of folk-tales.

For this reason European folk-lore creates the impression that the whole stories are units, that their cohesion is strong, and the whole complex very old. The analysis of American material, on the other hand, demonstrates that complex stories are new, that there is little cohesion between the component elements, and that the really old parts of tales are the incidents and a few simple plots.

Only a few stories form an exception to this rule—such as the Magic Flight or Obstacle myth—which are in themselves complex, the parts having no inner connection, and which have nevertheless a very wide distribution.

From a study of the distribution and composition of tales we must then infer that the imagination of the natives has played with a few plots, which were expanded by means of a number of motives that have a very wide distribution, and that there is comparatively little material that seems to belong to any one region exclusively, so that it might be considered as of autochthonous origin. The character of the folk-tales of each region lies rather in the selection of preponderant themes, in the style of plots, and in their literary development.