Nothing can be more true, or more admirably stated.  These remarks are, indeed, the charter, so to speak, of anthropological mythology and of folklore.  The old mythologists worked at a hortus siccus, at myths dried and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin.  But we now study myths ‘in the unrestrained utterances of the people,’ either of savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class.  The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopoeic state of mind—­regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told of a death in the family.  Their myths are still not wholly out of concord with their habitual view of a world in which an old woman may become a hare.  As soon as learned Jesuits like Pere Lafitau began to understand their savage flocks, they said, ’These men are living in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’  They found mythology in situ!  Hence mythologists now study mythology in situ—­in savages and in peasants, who till very recently were still in the mythopoeic stage of thought.  Mannhardt made this idea his basis.  Mr. Max Muller says, {0d} very naturally, that I have been ’popularising the often difficult and complicated labours of Mannhardt and others.’  In fact (as is said later), I published all my general conclusions before I had read Mannhardt.  Quite independently I could not help seeing that among savages and peasants we had mythology, not in a literary hortus siccus, but in situ.  Mannhardt, though he appreciated Dr. Tylor, had made, I think, but few original researches among savage myths and customs.  His province was European folklore.  What he missed will be indicated in the chapter on ’The Fire-Walk’—­one example among many.

But this kind of mythology in situ, in ’the unrestrained utterances of the people,’ Mr. Max Muller tells us, is no province of his.  ’I saw it was hopeless for me to gain a knowledge at first hand of innumerable local legends and customs;’ and it is to be supposed that he distrusted knowledge acquired by collectors:  Grimm, Mannhardt, Campbell of Islay, and an army of others.  ’A scholarlike knowledge of Maori or Hottentot mythology’ was also beyond him.  We, on the contrary, take our Maori lore from a host of collectors:  Taylor, White, Manning (’The Pakeha Maori’), Tregear, Polack, and many others.  From them we flatter ourselves that we get—­as from Grimm, Mannhardt, Islay, and the rest—­mythology in situ.  We compare it with the dry mythologic blossoms of the classical hortus siccus, and with Greek ritual and temple legend, and with Marchen in the scholiasts, and we think the comparisons very illuminating.  They have thrown new light on Greek mythology, ritual, mysteries, and religion.  This much we think we have already done, though we do not know Maori, and though each of us can hope to gather but few facts from the mouths of living peasants.

Examples of the results of our method will be found in the following pages.  Thus, if the myth of the fire-stealer in Greece is explained by misunderstood Greek or Sanskrit words in no way connected with robbery, we shall show that the myth of the theft of fire occurs where no Greek or Sanskrit words were ever spoken. There, we shall show, the myth arose from simple inevitable human ideas.  We shall therefore doubt whether in Greece a common human myth had a singular cause—­in a ’disease of language.’