instead of being a single plant which has propagated itself through many centuries. In spite of the evident possibility that such sporadic development might have taken place, I cannot believe that it happened so. If we had to do with some vaguely outlined myth in which only the underlying idea was the same in the several groups of variants, and if this vague tale were narrated among peoples of absolutely no kinship to one another, say by the Indians of North America and the Zulus, one could have no reasonable doubt that similar conditions had produced similar tales. Such stories exist in numbers sufficient to render untenable the old hypothesis of Oriental origins in anything like the form in which it was held by Benfey or even Cosquin.
In cases like that of The Grateful Dead, however, the matter is entirely different. The theme is comparatively a complicated one, and it is found only in lands whose inhabitants are connected either by blood or by social and political intercourse.[1] It has preserved its integrity for nearly a score of centuries, though suffering many changes of details, and a variety of combinations with other themes. To my mind such an involved relationship as that worked out in the preceding chapters proves conclusively that the story is one, that the connection between variants is more than fortuitous. Inductive logic makes the belief inevitable. Any other theory would involve us in a bewildering net of contradictions, from which escape could be found only in the avowal that nothing whatever can be known about narrative development.
If the seemingly inevitable conclusion be accepted that The Grateful Dead is an organism with a life history of its own, the question at once suggests itself as to when and where it came into being. As to its
- ↑ Annamite is an exception, but it cannot be regarded as having any organic connection with the cycle.
