There are still those, one discovers, who contend that myth should be given to children as literature, because later in life--when they come to read the _Aeneid_ in High School, or _Paradise Lost_ in college, or _Prometheus Unbound_ or even Macaulay's essays--they will come upon references to Zeus, to the fall of Troy, to the Titans, to Isis and Osiris, and they ought to be able to call up from what they had as literature in the elementary school such information as would enable them to understand these allusions and fill out these references. Luckily, the number of people who hold the fundamental theory of education adumbrated in this view is becoming so rapidly smaller that this chapter will, let us hope, be too late to reach them. The multiplication table is a tool; the mechanics of reading and writing are partially mere tools; but mythology, especially mythology substituted for literature, can in no sense be regarded or treated as a tool. Occasionally one meets the statement that myth, and mythical episodes, are more imaginative than stories of human life, and should therefore be given to little children as literature. So far as the persons who hold this view can be pushed to definite terms, they mean either that the conditions of ordinary human life are completely abrogated in mythical stories, and that therefore they are more imaginative than stories of mere human experience could be; or that the details given by the imagination are arranged in some more unusual way--that there is less of judgment and order in the arrangement than in stories of men and their affairs. Of course, we realize that the human mind cannot invent ultimate details independent of experience. It is in the number and arrangement of these details that originality inheres--that the varying quality or quantity of imagination lies. Now, it is true that in mythical stories the images, the details, are likely to be more numerous, and to be arranged in a less orderly manner than in an art story; this is of the nature of myth. Ruskin, in _The Queen of the Air_, makes so clear a statement of this principle that I shall borrow it for this chapter: