There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus, instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.

But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr. Nash has an answer for us.  ‘Oh,’ he says, ’all this is merely a machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly.  How similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote!  We see in this similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according to the formative pressure of external circumstances.  The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.’  And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental romance.  He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with Alexander of Macedon, ’we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance into its present form.  We may compare these statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the Traveller’s Song.’  No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to have a common property in many marvellous stories.  This is one of the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special ’variety of development,’ which, to use Mr. Nash’s own words, ’the formative pressure of external circumstances’ has occasioned; and not the formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure from within.  It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in a philosophic spirit wants to know.  Where is the force, for scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly?  Where is even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan:  ’Three times must we all die, before we come