The principal object of this Foreword is to inform the expert
Folkloreist and the case-hardened Mythologist (comparative or
otherwise) that the following pages are intended for those who,
being neither expert nor case-hardened, come under that gracious
and catholic term—general reader. The writer addresses not the
scholiast, but the ordinary person who likes to read about what
he has not time to study. nd there are many, doubtless, which
are in some sort fragments of the old mythologies filtered to us
through Greece. But, on the whole, it is more reasonable to
conclude that the simple stories of the marvellous or irrational
have their origin in 'the qualities of the uncivilized
imagination.' Thus, with regard to the current superstitions of
our peasantry and of the Highlanders, it is much more rational
to consider them, as Dr. Robert Chambers did, as 'springing from
a disposition of the human mind to account for actual
appearances by some imagined history which the appearances
suggest,' than as relics of the