by means of divination: a man would hold a shell-ring at arm's length and then question the spirit, who answered by making the arm whirl round and round. This was commonly spoken of as "talking with the spirit," Dr. Rivers and I have seen it done time and again, and the natives probably still talk with ghosts at the present day, unless they are now Christianised. Thus, what appeared at first a miracle turns out to be the most commonplace affair, so commonplace that a native story-teller would not need to go into any explanations, but only just report the conversation between the ghost and the living, and his hearers would immediately understand how it was carried on. But let a stranger hear it who has never talked with spirits, and he will necessarily construe it as a miracle, and turn into a wonder what is really a plain tale which might well be true in every detail.
This example should teach us how frequent such interpretations must be, and how numerous the myths scattered among the writings of scholars discoursing on ancient literary remains which assume in readers a knowledge which we no longer possess.
Loss of meaning and new interpretations are by no means confined to myths. They are familiar to every student of language. For example, the Latin preposition tenus, "as far as," was originally a noun in the accusative, and as long as it was felt it governed the genitive; but when it became obsolete, except in this use it was mistaken for a preposition and took the ablative.[1] The word tenus was once a living noun; its accusative formed part of a complete system, or declension; but when that system broke down, the accusative used as a preposition was left an unattached vagrant; it had to be adopted into a different family of words in order to become intelligible, and on being so adopted it assumed the style of its new relations. Mrs. Wright's fascinating book on Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore
- ↑ Giles, Manual of Comparative Philology, p. 57.
