Parallel cases of legend-construction readily suggest themselves. In our own time, in the glare of nineteenth century civilization, legends originate in the same way. Here is a case in point: In 1875, the Anthropological Society of Western Prussia instituted a series of investigations, in the course of which the complexion and the color of the hair and eyes of the children at the public schools were to be noted, in order to determine the prevalence of certain racial traits. The most extravagant rumors circulated in the districts of Dantzic, Thorn, Kulm, all the way to Posen. Parents, seized by unreasoning terror, sent their children, in great numbers, to Russia. One rumor said that the king of Prussia had lost one thousand blonde children to the sultan over a game of cards; another, that the Russian government had sold sixty thousand pretty girls to an Arab prince, and to save them from the sad fate conjectured to be in store for them, all the pretty girls at Dubna were straightway married off.--Similarly, primitive man, to satisfy his intellectual cravings, explained the phenomena of the heavens, the earth, and the waters by legends and myths, the germs of polytheistic nature religions. In our case, the tissue of facts is different, the process the same. But legends express the idealism of the masses; they are the highest manifestations of spiritual life. The thinker's flights beyond the confines of reality, the inventor's gift to join old materials in new combinations, the artist's creative impulse, the poet's inspiration, the seer's prophetic vision--every emanation from man's ideal nature clothes itself with sinews, flesh, and skin, and lives in a people's legends, the repositories of its art, poetry, science, and ethics.