service. Thus, about the time when the Grimms were collecting their stories, Scott wrote (in a note to the Lady of the Lake), "The mythology of one period would appear to pass into the romance of the next, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages." Mr. Max Müller expresses the same idea (Chips, xi. 243), "The gods of ancient mythology were changed into the demigods and heroes of ancient epic poetry, and these demigods again became at a later age the principal characters in our nursery tales." The opposite of this theory might be expressed thus, "Stories originally told about the characters of savage tales were finally attracted into the legends of the gods of ancient mythology, or were attributed to demigods and heroes." The reasons for preferring this view (the converse of Mr. Müller's) will presently be explained. In the meantime Mr. Müller's hypothesis "has great allies" in Scott; and in Von Hahn, who holds that myths are imaginative descriptions of the greater elementary powers and changes of nature; that the Saga or heroic epic localises the myths in real places, and attributes the adventures to supposed ancestral heroes, and, finally, " that the Märchen, or Household Tale is the last and youngest form of the saga" (Griechische Märchen p. 5).
Starting from this point, namely, from the doubt as to whether märchen are the youngest (Von Hahn. Max Müller), or rather, as we shall attempt to show, the oldest extant form of the higher myths, we will endeavour to explain our theory of the whole subject. That theory must first be stated as briefly and clearly as possible.
With regard (1) to the Origin of the peculiar and irrational features of myth and märchen we believe them to be derived and inherited from the savage state of man, from the savage conditions of life, and the savage way of regarding the world. (2) As to the Diffusion of the tales, we
