Re-classed // 20 - 31 AVAL PREFACE. THE purpose of this book is to make known some of the most remarkable discoveries which have been achieved by the successors and countrymen of Jacob Grimm, and to indicate, in a manner not too abstruse for the general reader, the method and line of research which they have pursued, with a success in some instances surpassing all expectation. The labours of their great master have received due honour in this country: they have gladdened the hearts of our children, enriched the minds of our studious men, and nurtured a spirit of inquiry which has done not a little towards rescuing from oblivion the perishing remains of the old ways of life and thought of our forefathers. Learned and unlearned, we have all been delighted to sit as listeners at the feet of Jacob Grimm, but I am not aware that any attempt has yet been made to naturalize amongst us the admirable fruits secured within the last few years by German explorers of 293861 vi his school. PREFACE. Yet the attempt is surely worth making; for it may be truly said that it is only through the ultimate facts ascertained by these men that we begin to discern the true value and the mutual bearings of all the secondary facts collected by their predecessors. The grand distinction of the new school is that they have worked with a new instrument-the Sanscrit language and literature an instrument which has yielded in their hands, and promises to yield still more abundantly, results fairly comparable with those which spectral analysis has realized in physical science. They have made it their task to trace back the traditional beliefs and popular customs of ancient and modern Europe to their common source, and have found the object of their search in the crude conceptions of nature, and of the powers that rule it, which were entertained by a primæval race of nomades, the ancestors of all the chief European races. In this way not only have they succeeded in demonstrating what was but dimly surmised before-the radical unity of all the principal pagan religions of the West, but they have evolved a principle of order out of the seeming chaos of ancient and modern superstitions, and assigned an intelligible cause for many of its doc trines and practices apparently the most fantastic and unmeaning. What, for instance, could well have appeared more hopeless than any attempt to account for the origin of a custom so universal, yet apparently so whimsical, as divination with the sieve and shears, or for that of the belief that witches, like the weird sisters in "Macbeth," were in the habit of sailing over the sea or through the air in a sieve? Yet it has been ascertained that the custom and the belief were no arbitrary freaks of fancy, but normal -deductions from primitive notions of natural phenomena and their supposed causes. So too all our legends of magic treasures concealed in lakes, swamps, or mountains, and coming to the light at stated periods, are found to have had a similar origin; and the invention of the divining-rod has been brought home to a people, among whom the more practical invention of a simple instrument for producing fire from the friction of two pieces of wood was regarded as a prodigious effort of superhuman genius. In the foremost rank of the learned Germans who are worthily building up the edifice of which Grimm laid the broad and massive foundations in his "Deutsche Mythologie," stands Dr. Adalbert Kuhn, the author of many profound researches in compara tive philology and mythology. His work "On the Descent of Fire and the Drink of the Gods" marks a new epoch in the history of the latter science. It has now been four years before the world, having been published in 1859, and the soundness of its surprising demonstrations has been acknowledged by the best judges in Germany and France. It is my chief authority for what will seem newest to English readers in the greater part of the following pages ; and although the very different nature of my work has seldom allowed me to translate two or three consecutive sentences from Dr. Kuhn's elaborate treatise, yet I wish it to be fully understood that but for the latter the former could not have been written. I am the more bound to state this once for all, as emphatically as I can, because the very extent of my indebtedness has hindered me from acknowledging my obligations to Dr. Kuhn, in the text or in footnotes, as constantly as I have done in most other cases. In not a few instances I have been able to illustrate Dr. Kuhn's principles by examples from the folk-lore of Great Britain and Ireland, and would gladly have done so more copiously had matter for the purpose been more accessible. My efforts in that direction have made me painfully aware how |