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Excerpt from The Test-Theme in North American Mythology: Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University Now, that these consistently developed tales are nature - mythological in either of the ways mentioned is not a fundamental law of comparative mythology, but an hypothesis. That they are is inferred from the criteria. But the criteria are ambiguous; all are intelligible as elements of a human folk-tale. Greed and rapid growth are as natural in a human as in a celestial hero. Though the moon-spots are sometimes conceived as warts or lice, an ogre with these characteristics is not necessarily a lunar being. Magical births present no difficulty, if we remember with Wundt (93: 330) that the universe of folk-lore is dominated by magic. The birth of splinter-foot-girl from a splinter need not have any further psychological basis in common with other ideas of magical conception. (31 That it has anything to do with the fertilization of the earth by the sun 34: 602) would be an entirely arbitrary assumption. From the same point of view the restoration of the dead is intelligible without resorting to a corresponding phenomenon in the heavens. As for the swallowing motive, Ehrenreich admits that the natural processes which gave rise to it are not necessarily the same throughout: eclipses as well as the sunset may have inspired the idea. (33 53, But if a plural origin is admitted, it is difficult to understand why every instance of swallowing must go back to some celeszial occurrence. In the Ute tale of Porcupine killing a fat buffalo that carries him across stream in his paunch it is difficult in spite of the specious analogy of quills and the sun's rays to see more than a simple animal tale. (55: The observation of animals yields examples enough of swallowing, and the grotesquely unrealistic transformation of such observations involves nothing psy chologically improbable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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