is too narrow, and is too devoid of evidence. Another explanation will presently be offered.
We may now leave Sir George's theories of the diffusion and origin of Household Tales. They are widely diffused, he thinks, because the race which originally evolved them is also scattered far and wide, and has carried them everywhere in its wanderings. The stories originated, again, in man's early habit of imaginatively endowing all things with life, in his almost exclusive preoccupation with the changes of the day and the year, and in "polyonymy," and forgetfulness of the meaning of language. The third problem, as we saw, is to explain the relations between Household Tales and the higher mythologies. Are children's märchen the detritus the last worn relics of the higher myths, as these reached the peasant class, and passed through the fancy of nurses and grandmothers? Or do the Household Tales rather represent the oldest forms of the Romantic myths, and are the heroic legends of Greece, India, Finland, Scandinavia, Wales, merely the old nursery stories elaborated and adorned by the arts of minstrels and priests? On the former hypothesis, märchen are a detritus; on the latter märchen are rather the surviving shapes of the original germs of myths. On this topic Sir George Cox, as far as we have ascertained his meaning, appears to hold what is perhaps the most probable opinion, that in certain cases the Household Tale is the decaying remnant of the half-forgotten myths, while in other cases it rather represents the original näif form out of which the higher myth has been elaborated (Ar. Myth. i. 123). Possibly we have not succeeded here in apprehending the learned author's sense. As a rule, however, writers on these subjects believe in the former hypothesis, namely, that Household Tales are the detritus of the higher myths; are the old heroic coins defaced and battered by long
