P. 255. Myths and the rules of their interpretation have been made of late years the subject of controversy almost as keen as that which has raged round that primary question concerning the existence of _nature-worship_ which we have discussed above. In this (XI.) and the previous chapters the writers have endeavoured to keep before the reader only those features in a myth which are essential towards the information we are seeking. For instance, the number of myths which can in any system be traced to the phenomena of the sun is a matter of the highest importance, as showing the influence which a certain set of phenomena had upon the national mind: but of much less significance is the question of the exact origin of the different features in these legendary tales. If any given tale be found to originate _solely_ in a confusion of language, a mistaken, misinterpreted epithet, then it has almost no interest for us as an interpreter of the popular thought and feeling: unless indeed the shape which the story takes should reproduce (as it probably will) some one of the universal forms which seem to stand ready in the human mind for the moulding of its legends. With regard to the particular question of sun (and other nature) myths and their occurrence, the question which stands between rival disputants is something of this sort: ‘All myths, that is, all primitive legends,’ says one party which may be regarded as the philological school, ‘are found, if we examine closely enough into the meaning of the proper names which occur in them, to represent originally some natural phenomenon, which is in nine cases out of ten (at least for southern nations) a story of some part of the sun’s daily course, some one of his innumerable aspects.’ ‘Is it conceivable,’ say their opponents (we may call these the anthropologists) ‘that man could ever have been in such a condition that all his attention was turned upon the workings of nature or upon the heavenly bodies? Far more probable is it, that these stories arose from a variety of natural causes, real traditions of some hero, reminiscences of historical events transformed in the mist of exaggeration, or the legacy of days when men had strange and almost inconceivable ideas about the world they live in, when they thought animals spoke and had histories like men, that men could and frequently did become trees, and trees men, etc., etc. Indeed, so strange and senseless are the notions of primitive men, that it is wasted labour to try and interpret them.’ This is a rough statement of the two heads of argument. The second, so far as merely negative, must fall before positive proof, as that the nature-myth hidden in an immense number of stories can be by philology satisfactorily unravelled. There is, however, also positive proof on the other side, when many stories, which as nature-myths interpreted on philological principles should only have existed among the people of a particular linguistic family, are found