Constant repetition of the same set of facts becomes irksome, and yet is made necessary by the legitimate demand for trustworthy and abundant evidence. As the reader must already have reflected, this living mythical belief in the common confused equality of men, gods, plants, beasts, rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society,(1) is one of the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and exactly described it among the Egyptians--"common and akin to men and gods they believed the beasts to be."(2) The belief in such equality is alien to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote Turner,(3) and for Melanesia, Codrington,(4) while for New Zealand we have Taylor.(5) For the Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: "Each tribe of these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, etc., and such is not eaten by that tribe" though the others may eat it.(6) As the majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not made out, by the evidence of institutions, that a confused credulity concerning the equality and kinship of man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling belief among savages, and even higher races, from the Lena to the Amazon, from the Gold Coast to Queensland, we may despair of ever convincing an opponent. The survival of the same beliefs and institutions among civilised races, Aryan and others, will later be demonstrated.(7) If we find that the mythology of civilised races here agrees with the actual practical belief of savages, and if we also find that civilised races retain survivals of the institutions in which the belief is expressed by savages, then we may surely infer that the activity of beasts in the myths of Greece springs from the same sources as the similar activity of beasts in the myths of Iroquois or Kaffirs. That is to say, part of the irrational element in Greek myth will be shown to be derived (whether by inheritance or borrowing) from an ascertained condition of savage fancy. (1) See some very curious and disgusting examples of this confusion in Liebrecht's Zur Volkskunde, pp. 395, 396 (Heilbronn, 1879). (2) De Abst., ii. 26. (3) Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238, and Samoa by the same author. Complete totemism is not asserted here, and is denied for Melanesia. (4) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., "Religious Practices in Melanesia". (5) New Zealand, "Animal Intermarriage with Men". (6) Description of Asia (1783), p. 383.