that it is now really desirable to warn students that it has a reasonable as well as an unreasonable side, and to remind them that some wild legends undoubtedly do, and therefore that many others may, contain a kernel of historic truth.
Learned and ingenious as the old systems of rationalizing myth have been, there is no doubt that they are in great measure destined to be thrown aside. It is not that their interpretations are proved impossible, but that mere possibility in mythological speculation is now seen to be such a worthless commodity, that every investigator devoutly wishes there were not such plenty of it. In assigning origins to myths, as in every other scientific enquiry, the fact is that increased information, and the use of more stringent canons of evidence, have raised far above the old level the standard of probability required to produce conviction. There are many who describe our own time as an unbelieving time, but it is by no means sure that posterity will accept the verdict. No doubt it is a sceptical and a critical time, but then scepticism and criticism are the very conditions for the attainment of reasonable belief. Thus, where the positive credence of ancient history has been affected, it is not that the power of receiving evidence has diminished, but that the consciousness of ignorance has grown. We are being trained to the facts of physical science, which we can test and test again, and we feel it a fall from this high level of proof when we turn our minds to the old records which elude such testing, and are even admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be relied on. Historical criticism becomes hard and exacting, even where the chronicle records events not improbable in themselves; and the moment that the story falls out of our scheme of the world's habitual course, the ever repeated question comes out to meet it — Which is the more likely, that so unusual an event should have really happened, or that the record should be misunderstood or false? Thus we gladly seek for sources of history in antiquarian relics, in undesigned and collateral proofs, in documents not written
