4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on the well-defined lines of totemism--that is, claims descent from or other close relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of those objects the sanction of his marriage prohibitions and blood-feuds, while he makes skill in magic a claim to distinguished rank. Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the more "senseless" factors in civilised mythology as "survivals" of these ideas and customs preserved by conservatism and local tradition, or, less probably, borrowed from races which were, or had been, savage. (2) Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined the mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would have been, superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were also existing among certain low savages. It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account for many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society, even in dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything so closely connected as is mythology with the conservative religious sentiment and tradition. Our object, then, is to prove that the "silly, savage, and irrational" element in the myths of civilised peoples is, as a rule, either a survival from the period of savagery, or has been borrowed from savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly, is an imitation by later poets of old savage data.(1) For example, to explain the constellations as metamorphosed men, animals, or other objects of terrestrial life is the habit of savages,(2)--a natural habit among people who regard all things as on one level of personal life and intelligence. When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India, are also popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals and the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition of the Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have been borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage or apt to copy savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a poet of a late age may have invented a new artificial myth on the old lines of savage fancy. (1) We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas which survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each other, or use stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers are not fully developed, and hasty analogy from their own unreasoned consciousness is their chief guide. Myth, in Mr. Darwin's phrase, is one of the "miserable and indirect consequences of our highest faculties". Descent of Man, p. 69. (2) See Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths".