FOOTNOTES:
[182] Mr. MacCulloch, in the title of his interesting book, the Childhood of Fiction, has emphasised this mischievous idea. I am not convinced to the contrary by the evidence he gives as to the popularity of the folk-tale among all peoples (p. 2). Indeed, the book itself is an emphatic testimony against its title. Mr. MacCulloch evidently began with the idea that the folk-tale belonged to the domain of fiction. Thus the opening words of his book are: "Folk-tales are the earliest form of romantic and imaginative literature—the unwritten fiction of early man and of primitive people in all parts of the world;" whereas as he nears the end of his study he observes: "Thus, in their origin, folk-tales may have had some other purpose than mere amusement; they may have embodied the traditions, histories, beliefs, ideas, and customs of men at an early stage of civilisation" (p. 451). Mr. MacCulloch himself proves this to be the case, and it is therefore all the more unfortunate that he should have stamped his very important study with the word "fiction."
[183] A folk-tale of the Veys, a North African people, explains this view most graphically in its opening sentences. The narrator begins his tale by saying: "I speak of the long time past; hear! It is written in our old-time-palaver-books—I do not say then; in old time the Vey people had no books, but the old men told it to their children and they kept it; afterwards it was written" (Journ. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., vi. 354). A parallel to this comes from Ireland: "What I have told your honour is true; and if it stands otherwise in books, it's the books which are wrong. Sure we've better authority than books, for we have it all handed down from generation to generation" (Kohl's Travels in Ireland, 140).
[184] I am the more willing to take this as my illustration of myth because, strangely enough, Mr. MacCulloch has omitted it from the examples he uses in his Childhood of Fiction.
[185] Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 166.
[186] Mr. Jeremiah Curtin has collected and published the Creation Myths of Primitive America (London, 1899), and his introduction is a specially valuable study of the subject. I printed the Fijian myth from Williams' Fiji and Fijians, i. 204, and the Kumis myth from Lewin's Wild Races of South-east India, 225-6, in my Handbook of Folklore, 137-139, and Mr. Lang, in cap. vi. of his Myth, Ritual, and Religion deals with a sufficient number of examples. Cf. also Tylor, Primitive Culture, cap. ix.
[187] Grey, Polynesian Mythology, 1-15. I have only summarised the full legend on the lines adopted by Dr. Tylor.
[188] On the Kronos myth consult Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, i. 23-31, who gives an admirable summary of the evidence as it at present stands; Harrison and Verrall, Mythology and Monuments of Anc. Athens, 192; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 295-323.
[189] Mr. Crawley discovered this story in Mr. Bain's A Digit of the Moon, 13-15, and printed it in his Mystic Rose, 33-34.
[190] "The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature," and "Mr. Gladstone and Genesis," in Science and Hebrew Tradition, cap. iv. and v.