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Nor would the theory account for the absence of a taboo in the lower savagery, nor for the totemistic character of the lady, nor, least of all, for the peltry which is the most picturesque, if not the most important, incident in this group of tales. In fact, the only direct evidence for Liebrecht's contention is the variant of Wild Edric's legend alluded to by Map.
The theory is, indeed, an admirable illustration of the danger of reasoning without a sufficiently wide area of induction. Liebrecht's mistake on the present occasion was twofold: he only dealt with one or, at most, two types of the myth; and he ignored the savage variants.
All these Totemism, the equality and essential identity of nature between man and all other objects in the universe, the doctrine of Transformation, the doctrine of Spirits are phases of savage thought, every one of which has been incorporated in the myth of the Swan-maidens, and every one of which, except one special and very limited development of the doctrine of Spirits, is ignored in Liebrecht's theory.
If he has mistaken the meaning of the legends, we should be able to make clear the source of his error. It arises, I hold, from an imperfect apprehension of the archaic philosophy underlying the narratives. Liebrecht's comparisons are, with one exception, limited to European variants. His premises were thus too narrow to admit of his making valid deductions.
Retrospect The fairies of Celtic and Teutonic races of the same nature as the supernatural beings celebrated in the traditions of other nations All superstitions of supernatural beings explicable by reference to the conceptions of savages Liebrecht's Ghost Theory of some Swan-maiden myths MacRitchie's Finn Theory The amount of truth in them Both founded on too narrow an induction Conclusion.
With a loud cry she flew straight to it, and vanished beneath the surface. Liebrecht's next reason is based upon the place where the maiden is found, a forest, or a house in the forest.
Leaving this one example of the value of Liebrecht's theory, as applied to water-spirits, to stand for all, I turn to another order of beings with supernatural powers referred to several times in the foregoing pages: I mean Witches.
Moreover, the correspondence I have tried to point out between the etiquette of various peoples and the taboo, such, for instance, as the ban upon a husband's breaking into his wife's seclusion at a delicate moment in his family history, would remain, on Liebrecht's theory, purely accidental.
In reasoning by induction, the greater the number of facts taken into account, the greater the probability of sound reasoning; and therefore the greater the number of facts a theory will explain, the more likely it is to be true. Had Liebrecht's theory touched only the Swan-maiden group, it would have been more convenient to discuss it in the last chapter.
Time is not known there; and the same consequences of permanent abode follow upon eating the food of the dead and the food of the fairies. Further, when living persons are stolen by fairies, mere dead images are sometimes left in their place. These arguments, and such as these, might well be added to Liebrecht's; and it would be hard to say that a formidable case was not made out.
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