And then grave and able men,—­philosophers, scientists,—­were seen with note-books and pencils, going out into Hindoo villages, into German cottages, into Highland huts, into Indian tepees, in short, into all lands, taking down with the utmost care, accuracy, and respect, the fairy-stories, myths, and legends of the people;—­as repeated by old peasant-women, “the knitters in the sun,” or by “gray-haired warriors, famousèd for fights.”

And, when they came to put these narratives in due form, and, as it were, in parallel columns, it became apparent that they threw great floods of light upon the history of the world, and especially upon the question of the unity of the race.  They proved that all the nations were repeating the same stories, in some cases in almost identical words, just as their ancestors had heard them, in some most ancient land, in “the dark background and abysm of time,” when the progenitors of the German, Gaul, Gael, Greek, Roman, Hindoo, Persian, Egyptian, Arabian, and the red-people of America, dwelt together under the same roof-tree and used the same language.

But, above all, these legends prove the absolute fidelity of the memory of the races.

We are told that the bridge-piles driven by the Romans, two thousand years ago, in the rivers of Europe,

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from which the surrounding waters have excluded the decaying atmosphere, have remained altogether unchanged in their condition.  If this has been the case for two thousand years, why would they not remain unchanged for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years?  If the ice in which that Siberian mammoth was incased had preserved it intact for a hundred years, or a thousand years, why might it not have preserved it for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years?

Place a universal legend in the minds of a race, let them repeat it from generation to generation, and time ceases to be an element in the problem.

Legend has one great foe to its perpetuation—­civilization.

Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent.  If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade:  they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson—­a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, jewels, and laces.

Hence we find the legends of the primitive American Indians adhering quite closely to the events of the past, while the myths that survive at all among the civilized nations of Europe are found in garbled forms, and. only among the peasantry of remote districts.

In the future more and more attention will be given to the myths of primitive races; they will be accounted as more reliable, and as reaching farther back in time than many things which we call history.  Thoughtful men will