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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE 66.
ON POLYNESIAN MYTHOLOGY.
EXTRACTS from an Introduction to the Rev. W. W. Gill's Myths and Songs from the South Pacific :'
If new minerals, plants, or animals are discovered, if strange petrifactions are brought to light, if flints or other stone weapons are dredged up, or works of art disinterred. even if a hitherto unknown language is rendered accessible for the first time, no one, I think, who is acquainted with the scientific problems of our age, would ask what their importance consists in, or what they are good for. Whether they are products of nature or works of man, if only there is no doubt as to their genuineness, they claim and most readily receive the attention, not only of the learned, but also of the intelligent public at large.
Now, what are these Myths and Songs which Mr. W. W. Gill has brought home from Mangaia, but antiquities, preserved for hundreds, it may be for thousands of years, showing us, far better than any stone weapons or stone idols, the growth of the human mind during a period which, as yet, is full of the most perplexing problems to the psychologist, the historian, and the theologian ? The only hope of our ever unravelling the perplexities of that, mythological period, or that mythopæic phase of the human intellect, lies in our gaining access to every kind of collateral evidence. We know that mythopæic period among the Aryan and Semitic races, but we know it from a distance only, and where are we to look now for living myths and legends, except among those who still think and speak mythologically, who are, in fact, at the present moment what the Hindus were before
