[10] "The myth is not dependent upon the text in which it appears for the first time. That text as we have it was not written down by contemporary or nearly contemporary authority. Before it had become a written document it had lived long as oral tradition." (Gomme, op. cit., p. 125.)
[11] When myth is 'renovated,' cleansed, cast into literary form, or in any way subjected to alteration, it is known as 'secondary' myth—that is, it exists in a secondary state.
[12] "In this class of tradition we are in touch with the struggles of the earliest ancestors of man to learn about the unknown." (Gomme, op. cit., p. 130.)
[13] "All the knowledge they possess is that based upon their own material senses, and therefore when they apply that knowledge to subjects outside their own personality they deal with them in terms of their own personality." (Gomme, op. cit., p. 132.)
[14] Some modern writers believe animism to be a relatively late manifestation in the religious history of mankind. It seems to me to occur spontaneously wherever and whenever the mind of man is discovered in a condition sufficiently primitive to receive it, and as it is the original mental characteristic of all children, whether savage or civilized, I fail to recognize its significance as a later demonstration of human thought.
[15] Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (4th ed.), vol. i, p. 295.
[16] See remarks on totemism, [p. 28].
[17] Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 60.
[18] "Primitive science was also primitive belief." (Gomme, op. cit., p. 140.) Again (p. 132): "Where savages ask themselves, as they certainly do ask themselves, whence the sky, whence the winds, the sun, moon, stars, sea, rivers, mountains, and other natural objects, they reply in terms of good logic applied to deficient knowledge." Again (p. 130): "Our own research in the realms of the unknown we dignify by the name and glories of science. The research of our remote ancestors was of like kind.... It was primitive science."
[19] Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 369.