hyperbole ‘Let not the sun go down, O Zeus,’ etc., is put into the mouth of Agamemnon?... To be brief, the popular hero Samson has had the Twelve Labours of the Lybian Herakles transferred to him, and bears the doors, as Sandon or Melkart the pillars of the world, on his shoulders.'[11] The reader will agree with me in regarding it as superfluous at the present day to attempt a serious refutation of the hypothesis of _borrowing_, which assails the originality of the most primitive mythological ideas known to the nation under review. But it is impossible to evade the obligation to find an explanation of the manifold coincidences exhibited in the independently produced myths of nations belonging to quite different races. Under the new method of mythological enquiry this obligation is doubly pressing; for the coincidences appear yet more surprising, and occupy a more extensive sphere when the myths are considered analytically by the light of the new method, and from a linguistic point of view. Only then does the identity become psychologically important. And then it can in my view be explained only by the rejection of the prejudice that there are unmythological races, or at least one race incapable of forming any myths—the Semitic. If the Myth is a form of life of the human mind psychologically necessary at a certain stage of growth, then the intellectual life of every individual, nation, and race must pass through it. ‘The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more toward the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere,’ as Tylor maintains.[12] This means, applied to the present question, that if the formation of myths is a natural law of the ψυχή (mind) at a certain stage, it must necessarily occur everywhere where there is a beginning of intellectual life, unless we could speak of whole races or tribes as psychologically pathologic,[13] and make the whole Semitic race thus pathologic on account of its alleged incapacity to form myths—which would, after all, be rather a curious proceeding. No doubt we often read in ethnological works of nations without a trace of Mythology. But we ought not to forget either that such informants understand by Mythology only complicated stories and fables, which in my view represent the more advanced stage of mythic development, or that they identify Mythology with heathen religious ideas, and confound absence of religion or atheism with want of myths. So, e.g., Sir John Lubbock says, quoting Sibree,[14] ‘Even in Madagascar, according to a good authority, “there is nothing corresponding to a Mythology, _or any fables of gods or goddesses_, amongst the Malagasy;”’ but this want of stories of gods and goddesses is very far from demonstrating the absence of myths of all and every sort.