I do not think that a definition of the periods of myth-formation which starts with the Material of the myth can always afford a strictly reliable rule for judging a mythic stratum and assigning it to this or that period of civilisation. For it must not be left unnoticed that, when once the notion of hunting or of herds has come into existence, it does not vanish from the mental inventory of man as soon as ever the stage of civilisation is passed on which that portion of mankind occupies itself with hunting or keeping herds. On the other hand, the entrance of a more advanced stage of civilisation does not imply the utter banishment out of human society of everything connected with the preceding, though, speaking generally, this was now passed and gone. Otherwise, how could we at the present day, when the hunting age is left so many thousand years behind us, still have our hunting adventures and enjoy all the pleasures belonging to the sportsman’s life? And must there not be shepherds even in agricultural countries, although the agriculturist has long passed the stage of nomadism? Consequently, from the phraseological material employed in the myth it is only possible to infer the _terminus a quo_ referring to its origin, but not the _terminus ad quem_. Else we should be entangled in the same mistakes into which the earlier Danish antiquaries fell, when from the occurrence of stone, bronze, or iron instruments in a tumulus or avenue, they inferred that the tumulus or avenue was so and so old; not considering that the material of a completed period is propagated into the next epoch, as is shown in all those prehistorical finds in which instruments of all possible materials appear promiscuously, as James Fergusson has convincingly proved.[208] We are in the same case with the phraseology of the Myth. On the ascent out of each of the great periods, the ideas connected with it, which began with the entrance into it, cannot disappear. The idea, having once been grasped by man, remains always present to him, and can be conveniently used to give names to natural phenomena connected with the same circle of ideas; and he does not cease to take notice of natural phenomena while forming myths. Thus even the agriculturist may have spoken of the Sun’s hunts; and even at the agricultural stage myths may still have arisen which spoke of the Sun as a sportsman armed with arrows with which he slays the dragon. It is accordingly not the mythic material that is of the highest moment in sketching the chief stages of development in the formation of myths, but rather the _Tendency_ of the myth—the position occupied by man in relation to external nature, so far as appears from the myths in question. How, according to this scale of development, the stages of the myth among the Aryans are reflected in their mythology, I do not presume to judge, being on Aryan ground only a _dilettante_. I will, however, quote some examples from the special ground of these studies, to