and systematic way than the Christian, who believes that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without the Father. We must not confound the primitive maker of religious myth with the primitive man. It would lead to error if we modelled our idea of the average modern European on Bunyan, Milton, or Dante. It is sometimes asserted that the impossible and miraculous occurrences which we so often meet with in the narratives of the primæval myth-maker are to him true. Why should he be limited to fact in this way? No doubt his standard of truth is different from our own. He would regard as possible many things which we know to be impossible. But is it necessary to suppose that his knowledge that a thing was impossible should prevent him, any more than our modern storytellers, from utilizing it in his imaginative work? Jules Verne well knew that a voyage round the moon is an impossibility. The unknown author or authors of 'Cinderella' surely need not be credited with a belief that pumpkins can be converted into coaches by the stroke of a fairy wand; the inventor of the story of the birth of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter knew quite well that such obstetrical operations were not feasible; and it is unnecessary to believe that the myth-makers of the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_ thought that children could be produced by crunching jewels in the mouth and spitting them out. There is, however, an exception to the rule that a storyteller does not believe in the truth of his own inventions. It is notoriously possible for the author of a fictitious narrative to become, after a time, unable to distinguish it from a statement of actual facts. There is a case on record in which a learned judge communicated to the Psychical Society in perfect good faith a ghost story, all the principal features of which were proved to be imaginary. They had their origin in his own talent as a distinguished raconteur. But this is a morbid phenomenon which must not be confounded with the normal action of the imagination in the child, the savage, or the primitive (or, indeed, any other) myth-maker. The inability to distinguish between imagination and fact is really not a special characteristic of the primitive man or savage, but of the literal-minded of all ages, in presence of the creations of imaginative genius. Some few primitive men may distinguish between the spiritual kernel and its imaginative envelopment. But for the multitude this is impossible. Unable to discriminate between these two elements, and dimly conscious that the whole is a valuable possession, they wisely accept it indiscriminately as actual fact.