Perhaps the races of this American-Polynesian region are gifted with some special degree of spiritual (instinctive) fitness for plant-breeding. They seem to be endowed with a particular proclivity for sympathetically identifying themselves with and patiently waiting upon the course of natural phenomena, perhaps especially the phenomena of animate nature, which never seem alien or incomprehensible to the Indian. Such at least is the consistent suggestion carried by their myths, legends and symbolism. The typical American cosmogony is a tissue of legends of fecundity and growth, even more than appears to hold true of primitive cosmogonies elsewhere.[42] And yet some caution in accepting such a generalisation is necessary in view, for instance, of the mythological output along similar lines on the Mediterranean seaboard in early times. By native gift the Indian is a “nature-faker,” given to unlimited anthropomorphism. Mechanical, matter-of-fact appreciation of external and material phenomena seems to be in a peculiar degree difficult, irrelevant and incongruous with the genius of the race. But even if it should seem that this race, or group of races, is peculiarly given to such sympathetic interpretation of natural phenomena in terms of human instinct, the difference between them and the typical racial stocks of the old world in this respect is after all a difference in degree, not in kind. The like proclivity is in good evidence throughout, wherever any race of men have endeavoured to put their acquaintance with natural phenomena into systematic form. The bond of combination in the making of systems, whether cosmologic, mythic, philosophic or scientific, has been some putative human trait or traits. It may be that in their appreciation of facts and their making of systems the American races have by some peculiar native gift been inclined to an interpretation in terms of fertility, growth, nurture and life-cycles. * * * * *