the long Arctic winter night. In the Vedas, one of the epithets of the day is the extraordinary one of buttery dawn, which may be a reminiscence of this primitive Lapp rite.
8. The magicians kept magic flies in bags, which they let out to produce skin diseases in their enemies. An allusion to these magic flies may perhaps be traced in the flies in Golden Locks.
4. The Lapps believed in auguries by means of birds, a superstition which developed to such vast proportions in the classic world. In the Serbian legend we have the various legends of miraculous cocks, in Polish Iskrzytski, in Czech the Raras and Setek legends, in Slovenian Vtacok Bracok (bird-brother), and numerous other stories in which the hero or heroine is murdered and transformed into a bird. Specially noticeable is the transformation at will of the seer in the Sun-horse into a green bird. It was the special sign of a good noaide or Lapp magician to be able to change at will into the form of an animal or bird. Some of them could, it was pretended, change into as many as six different animals. Setek, the little boy with chicken claws, a regular enfant terrible reappears in Venetian folk-lore as Mazzariol, an old man who would turn into a baby, and let himself be washed and dandled by some good housewife, and then run off in his true form and stand in the street and laugh at her credulity.
5. In the root the woodman brings home in Otesanek and trims to form a little baby, which his wife puts to bed, feeds it with pap, and causes to come to life and grow into a veritable enfant terrible, may perhaps be traced a faint reminiscence of the pagan Lapps’ wooden idols which were formed out of the roots of birch trees.
We have thus traced our hypothetical primitive Arctic winter weather myth or fairy story, the source of all our principal literary forms and the most essential of our religious beliefs and superstitions to the creative minds of Arctic Mongols, and the influence upon them of the peculiar seasons of the Arctic circle. With the rude plan of the primitive Arctic myth the foundation is laid for a scientific study of folk-lore myths. Placing them in their natural groups (see plan) and arranging them in these according to the latitude of the place where they were collected, and then comparing the myths of each group minutely among themselves, it will, perhaps, be possible to reconstruct the primitive annual solar Arctic winter myth or weather allegory, which, if it actually existed, is the most ancient piece of literature in the world, compared to which Egyptian hieroglyphics are modern history. This re-constituted myth may possibly lead to the conviction that some seventy or more thousand years ago the climate of Siberia was temperate, and the Arctic circle was the centre of civilisation of a Turanian people like the present Samoyedes, of which the reconstituted myth is a relic, and of the warmer weather that prevailed there in those days. The civilisation of these ancient Turanians was not only high latitude but high. They were small with very round heads; swearing, theft and murder, and deeds of violence were unknown, or
