the texture, the belief in the life and personality of all things—in talking beasts and trees, in magical powers, in the possibility of visiting the dead—must, on our theory as already set forth, be found wherever men have either passed through savagery, and retained survivals of their intellectual condition, and wherever they have borrowed or imitated such survivals.
By this means, without further research, we may account for the similarity of the stuff of heroic myths and märchen. The stuff is the same as in nature-myths and divine myths.
But how is the similarity of the arrangement of the incidents and ideas into plots to be accounted for? The sagas, epic myths, and märchen do not appear to resemble each other everywhere (as the nature-myths do), because they are the same ideas applied to the explanation of the same set of natural facts. The sagas, epics, and märchen seem to explain nothing, but to be told, in the first instance, either to illustrate and enforce a moral, or for the mere pleasure of imaginative narration.
We are thus left, provisionally, with the notion that occasionally the resemblance of plot and arrangement may be accidental. In shaking the mental kaleidoscope, which contains a given assortment of ideas, the same combination may not impossibly be now and then produced everywhere. Or the story may have been invented once for all in one centre, but at a period so incalculably remote that it has filtered, in the exchanges and contacts of prehistoric life, all over the world, even to or from the Western Pacific and
