Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson--a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, jewels, and laces. Hence we find the legends of the primitive American Indians adhering quite closely to the events of the past, while the myths that survive at all among the civilized nations of Europe are found in garbled forms, and. only among the peasantry of remote districts. In the future more and more attention will be given to the myths of primitive races; they will be accounted as more reliable, and as reaching farther back in time than many things which we call history. Thoughtful men will {p. 118} analyze them, despising nothing; like a chemist who resolves some compound object into its original elements--the very combination constituting a history of the object. H. H. Bancroft describes myths as-- "A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction, not open to rationalistic criticism; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts cemented with wild fancies; it looms ever between the immeasurable and the measurable past." But he adds: "Never was there a time in the history of philosophy when the character, customs, and beliefs of aboriginal man, and everything appertaining to him, were held in such high esteem by scholars as at present." "It is now a recognized principle of philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having had in the beginning some foundation in fact."[1] An universal myth points to two conclusions: First, that it is based on some fact. Secondly, that it dates back, in all probability, to the time when the ancestors of the races possessing it had not yet separated. A myth should be analyzed carefully; the fungi that have attached themselves to it should be brushed off; the core of fact should be separated from the decorations and errors of tradition. But above all, it must be remembered that we can not depend upon either the geography or the chronology of a myth. As I have shown, there is a universal tendency to give the old story a new habitat, and hence we have Ararats and Olympuses all over the world. In the same [1. "The Native Races of America," vol. iii, p. 14.] {p. 119} way the myth is always brought down and attached to more recent events: