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There is the usual reverence for animals, with folk-stories of animal creators and of transformations, but no well-defined marks of totemism, and no recognition of individual protecting animal-spirits. +506+. In the Californian tribes, which are among the least developed in America, no traces of totemistic organization have been found. The people live, or lived, in villages.

In a more refined age the image becomes simply a symbol, a visible representation serving to fix the attention and recall divine things. Different races also differ in the extent of their demand for such representations of deity. +302+. Stones and rocks, like other natural objects, are starting-points for folk-stories and myths.

I may be quite wrong in this, but I think that most of the folk-stories coming from the natives are just their attempts to imitate white-man stories, and not original ideas of their own. The conditions or life in Australia for the aboriginal were so harsh, the struggle for existence was so keen, that he had not much time to cultivate ideas.

Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar with, Red Riding-Hood, the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the "Sleeping Beauty," and the rest, she had picked up somewhere most of the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany, which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales."

He partakes of the nature of both men and gods he is all-powerful, yet a creature of caprice and a slave of accident. To him society is supposed to owe an incalculable debt; but his mixed nature affords a wide field for bizarre myths and folk-stories, and he of necessity gives way to more symmetrical divine figures.

With the revival of interest in ballads, folk-stories, fairy stories and myths came a revival of interest in legends. The myths were highly imaginative and poetic explanations of the world and of the life of man in it at a time when scientific knowledge and habits of thought had not come into existence.

Nowhere else can we gain so clear and vivid a picture of the childhood of civilisation, when women were the transmitters of inheritance and the guardians of property. Let me try to prove this. I have before me a collection of these folk-stories, gathered from many countries.

The same idea underlies practically all other folk-stories: the essence of each of them is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of its protagonist.

Peg would sit beside her father as he drove and he would tell her little folk-stories, or sing wild snatches of songs of the days of the Rebellion; or quote lines ringing with the great Irish confidence in the triumph of Justice: "Lo the path we tread By our martyred dead Has been trodden 'mid bane and blessing, But unconquered still Is the steadfast will And the faith they died confessing."

It is the story of an adventure of a Knight of the Holy Grail; also a story involving the old principle of taboo; and one of many stories of the transformation of a human being into a swan, or a swan into a human being. This swan myth is one of the most widely spread of all transformation tales; it may even be found in the folk-stories of the American Indians.