Yet the anthropologists are more in the line of evolution, for they maintain that mythology on the whole represents an old stage of thought, from which civilised men have slowly emancipated themselves. This is also the view of Mr. Andrew Lang, who recently contributed a work on the subject. The scars so-called are the remains of that kind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation that prevail in human nature in its primitive barbarian state. And indeed when we contemplate the credulity, superstition, and readiness to accept the grotesque and fabulous, that dominate such inhabitants even of a civilised country as are kept ignorant and isolated, this theory seems to point to the main source of myth and fairy tale. As in the early literature of Greece the gods and heroes are mixed up, so in the records of the Gael. But the annalists and romancists of Ireland, who had a passion for writing history, evidently had no inkling of this. The thought of mythology was far enough removed from their way of thinking, and such floating tales and personages and events as they found wafted towards them on the stream of tradition they took for actual fact. At any rate, they wove them into the story of the past of their nation in such a way as to lead us to believe that the mythical beings were as real to them as the kings and warriors of their own age. And these historians had quite a craze for genealogy; never satisfied unless they could trace their chiefs or heroes and ancestors up to Adam, which they invariably succeed in doing, bridging the gaps with very fertile ingenuity. Thus the last great chasm to be spanned in the line of pedigree is the Deluge—to surmount which was a work more intricate and needing more skill in a manner than the Forth Bridge; for if they could once connect with Noah, the Bible record does the rest. The feat is accomplished, set down by the annalists of the Middle Ages with all the plausibility of sober fact. Forty days before the Flood, the Lady Cæsair, niece or granddaughter of Noah—it is immaterial which—with fifty girls and three men came to Ireland. This, we are to understand, was the first invasion or conquest of that country. All these were drowned in the Deluge, except Finntan, the husband of the lady, who escaped by being cast into a deep sleep, in which he continued for a year, and when he awoke he found himself in his own house at Dun Tulcha. It is charming to note with what precision and _sangfroid_ names are quoted in this legended history. At Dun Tulcha he lived throughout many dynasties down to the sixth century of our era, when he appears for the last time with eighteen companies of his descendants engaged in settling a boundary dispute. Being the oldest man in the world, he was _ipso facto_ the best informed regarding ancient landmarks.