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Muller, 'the change from sun to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the mere spell of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to miraculous charms more familiar to a later age. As a matter of fact, magical metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest savages than to people in a 'later age. Magic, as Castren observes, 'belongs to the lowest known stages of civilisation. Mr.
In the same way, some American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea, and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe.
His magic has now and then been examined by a competent anthropologist, like Mr. Im Thurn, and Castren closely observed the proceedings of the bound and bounding Shamans among the Samoyeds. But we need the evidence both of anthropologists and of adepts in conjuring. They might detect some of the tricks, though Mr. Mr.
To this we can only reply that we use the works of the best accessible authorities, men who do know the languages say, Dr. Codrington or Bishop Callaway, or Castren or Egede. Now it is not maintained that the myths, on the whole, are incorrectly translated.
A large proportion of the tales with which we are dealing were utterly unknown to literature until they were taken down by Grimm and Frere and Castren and Campbell, from the lips of ignorant peasants, nurses, or house-servants, in Germany and Hindustan, in Siberia and Scotland. Yet, as Mr.
The great ethnologist Castren dug up the same legend in Finland. It is common, as Dr. Dasent observes, to the Turks and Mongolians; "and a legend of the wild Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their marksmen."
This is daily confirmed by observation. The child is vastly more emotional than the man, the savage than his civilized neighbor. Castren, the Russian traveller, describes the Tartars and Lapps as a most nervous folk. When one shocks them with a sudden noise, they almost fall into convulsions.
I thanked him, and said I would go by it; before leaving him I asked to what place the road led which I had been following. "To Pentre Castren," he replied. I struck across the fields and should probably have tumbled half-a-dozen times over pales and the like, but for the light of the Cefn furnaces before me which cast their red glow upon my path.
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