with fairies or ghosts." As to the Lake Fairies, people "are not in the least afraid of them, but on the contrary rejoice whenever visited by them, as supposing them Friends to Mankind, and that they never come without bringing good fortune along with them."

I may point out here that Freyr and Freyja, who were connected with the Vana circle of Germanic Water-Deities, and their father, the seagod Njörd, were eminently bringers of fortune. To this day, therefore, women in Berlin and elsewhere-as is well known to German officials who have to do with the department of lost things-carry in their purses a dozen or more fish-scales, which, they think, "brings luck and money."

As to the Welsh Nix-tales, some of these are perhaps traceable to the Flemish, that is, Nether German, immigration. It is noteworthy also that Kymric lake-nymphs, too, should have yellow hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks, exactly like those of Germany. Such striking characteristics are at all events not mentioned without reason in the mythological tales or ancestral stories of primitive races. Thus, Hellenic heroes, and even deities were not unfrequently described as fair-haired. Aphrodite, Ares, Daphne, Helen, Achilleus, were blonde; not to speak of the Sun-god who, of course, had golden hair. Little coloured images, latterly discovered at Tanagra, in Greece, most faithfully show this same golden hair and the blue eyes, whilst, no doubt, the aboriginal tribes whom the Hellenic invaders overthrew, and with whom they became blended, were a dark-complexioned race, whose characteristics gradually got once more the upper hand in the later Greck race.

It is, therefore, not without some deeper meaning that among the mainly dark-haired Welsh people, among whom there is only a sprinkling of reddish hair, the Nixes, whenever they turn up, should have golden locks and blue eyes.

IX.

It would lead too far to enter more deeply, for the sake of comparison, into the differences of colour so clearly marked in Indian Folk-lore, as well as in the Rig-Veda, in reference to the Aryan conquerors on the one hand and the aboriginal tribes on the other. A few indications may suffice. In one of the Indian fairy tales collected by Miss Maive Stckes (Calcutta, 1879) we read:-" He was so struck by her beauty.

For

* Gylfi's Incantation, 23:-"He (Njord) is so rich and wealthy that he may grant to all who appeal to him, all kinds of goods, estates as well as movable property."

A

That isolated cape which forms the county of Pembroke was looked upon as a land of mystery by the rest of Wales, long after it had been settled by the Flemings in 1113. secret veil was supposed to cover this sea-girt promontory; the inhabitants talked in an unintelligible jargon that was neither English, nor French, nor Welsh; and out of its misty darkness came fables of a wondrous sort, and accounts of miracles marvellous beyond belief. Mythology and Christianity spoke together from this strange country, and one could not tell at which to be most amazed, the pagan or the priest." ("British Goblins: Welsh Folklore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions." By Wirt Sikes. 1880.) It need scarcely be said that the " jargon" of the Flemings is the Nether German (Nederduitsch) tongue, the same as that of the Dutch, the nearest-of-kin to the Nether German spoken all along the German Ocean and the Baltic-in fact, the language upon which the English tongue rests.

she had a fair, fair skin, rosy cheeks, blue eyes, rosy lips, golden eyelashes, and golden eye-brows, and golden hair." So also, Seventee Bai, the Daisy Lady, is thus described :-" Her eyes were like two stars; her golden hair fell in ripples to her feet; she was singing to herself."* Now, these are evidently ancient characteristics of a conquering race in India. Popular tales often preserve facts of this kind; thus in the Cornish tales collected by Bottrell, we still find the red hair of the Danish invaders clearly remembered to this day. "You red-haired Dane!" was an expression used but a few months ago in a Cornish

assault case.

:

Sir Neville Chamberlain says that "if you wish to praise a native (in India) for his valour and brave conduct, you say to him, 'Your countenance is red,' and that nothing is worse than to tell him his face is black."" And this is what Mr. Boxwell says about the expression “Kálá ádmí” in the fairy tales :"The stories are of the Aryan conquerors from beyond the Indus; distinguished by their fair skin from the dark aborigines of India. In Vedic times Varna, colour, is used for stock or blood, as the Latins used Nomen" (Comp. Rig-Veda, i., 104; ii., 4; iii., 31). The Rigsmál of the Edda has similarly preserved the characteristics of the "red-faced, bright-eyed, fair-haired" Teutonic conquerors of Scandinavia on the one hand, and of the "dark-skinned, bandy-legged, flat-nosed," conquered race on the other-the latter being evidently a Turanian, Finn, and Lapp people.

It may be, as Miss Maive Stokes remarks, that though the conquerors from the North were fairer and ruddier than the aborigines, and though the high-caste natives are to this day still fairer than the descendants of the aboriginal races, yet the phrases "Your cheeks are red," and "he is only a black man," do not in every instance account for the golden hair and the fair skin of so many Indian princes and princesses in folk-lore stories. Solar heroes are often, no doubt, thus described as to their colour, from obvious reasons. Yet I believe that as regards the still current folk-tales, the colour holds good in a great many cases for a real mark of Aryan or Indo-Germanic descent; all the more so because the leaders of that race boasted of a solar origin, to which their hair-"red like gold”—and their sky-blue eyes, easily lent themselves.

Even in Sir G. Grey's "Polynesian Mythology" we find a remarkable description of fairies by a people who once possessed fragments of ancient poems, dating from the time before they had reached their present home-poems now unfortunately lost. There, too, we see, that "the fairies are a very numerous people; merry, cheerful, and always singing, like the cricket. Their appearance is that of human beings, nearly resembling a European's; their hair being very fair, and so is their skin. They are very different from the Maories, and do not resemble them at all."

This opens up a large question of ethnological and historical import;

* "Old Deccan Days;" by Mary Frere. London : 1870.

but the answer is difficult, owing to the loss of so much heroic poetry and folk-lore among the Maories. Sir G. Grey himself, who thought little, as he himself says, of either the Saxon, Scandinavian, or Keltic systems of mythology—which he evidently did not understand—was, perhaps, not the very best instrument for saving whatever there was still left of those precious relics of Maori antiquity.

X.

The foregoing, which may seem to be a digression, sheds some light upon folk-tales of those parts of the United Kingdom which have Keltic or Kelt-Iberian precedents, or which formerly partook—so far as speech and bodily appearance are a guide-of that ethnological character.

Among Cornish fishermen, there are or were tales about "merrymaids" and "merry-men "; that is, mer-maids and mer-men. Now, in Cornwall, dark-haired Iberian, Phoenikian, Keltic, and Roman (in other words, Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan, or rather Etrusco-Aryan) races have mixed. We might, therefore, expect the inhabitants of the watery elfin-land in Cornwall to partake of the characteristics of those races. Yet, we find that when the Cornish mermaid makes her toilet, by the noontide sun, at the edge of the water, the hair she combs is "yellow as gold."* The Cornish fairies, also, have a Queen whose hair

is "like golden threads." Naturally, the question arises whether the merry-maid of Cornwall-the relation of the Breton "morverch," and of the Irish "merrow" or "moruach "-is not of northern, Germanic, at any rate of a different extraction from that of the less fair races who believed, or still believe, in her.

Upon the whole, the traces of the semi-divine fauna of the sca, as well as the romantic stories about the charmful Nix tribe, and their longing for the love of the human race, become fainter on the more Keltic or Kelt-Iberian ground of this country. One of these less distinct traces is to be found in the Irish Phooka,† who plays pranks similar to the Neck, the Nuggle, or the Kelpie; but no aquatic nature specially characterizes him.‡ Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, might, as countries powerfully washed or surrounded by the sea, be expected to yield a rich crop of those ocean-born tales. The reverse is, however, the fact. The tales there do not bear comparison with the Scotch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or German ones. "As the mermaid superstition," writes Mr. Wirt Sikes, the last explorer of Welsh fairy-lore, "is seemingly absent in Wales, so there are no fairy tales of maidens who lure "Popular Romances of the West of England." By Robert Hunt.

+ Phooka, Pooka, and Puck are no doubt related to each other. In Germany (SchleswigHolstein) there are Haus-Pucken,-Pucks of the House, domestic spirits. Puck is the servant of Oberon and Titania; and Oberon is but a Romanized form of the German Eltin-king Alberich.

"Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders." By William Henderson.

mortals to their doom beneath the water, as the Dracae did women and children, and as the Nymph of the Lurley did marriageable young men. But it is believed that there are several old Welsh families who are the descendants of the Gwragedd Annwn (elfin dames who dwelt under the water), as in the case of the Meddygon Myddfair. The familiar Welsh name of Morgan is sometimes thought to signify 'Born of the Sea.' But the class of stories in which a mortal marries a watermaiden is large, and while the local details smack of the soil, the general idea is so like in lands far remote from each other as to indicate a common origin in pre-historic times."

Now, it is strange that countries of so strong an oceanic character as Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland should, comparatively speaking, have kept so weak a hold upon those ancient myths, if their inhabitants possessed them of old. And when we see that in the stories they have retained, the main incidents run parallel with the fuller and widespread tales of the Teutonic conquerors of Britain, and that a name like that of the Kelpie cannot be explained from the native Gaelic tongue, the hypothesis of a fresh imprint of mythology having been made by the Germanic invasion upon the Keltic or Kelt-Iberian people of the North-west and the West, is one difficult to avoid.

Here and there, it is true, we find in Kelt-Iberian parts some mythical vestige of Nix-blood, as in the traditions of the O'Flaherty, O'Sullivan, and Macnamara families. These families, even like a considerable number of people in northern lands, are said to trace their descent from the amorous attachment of mer-men and mer-maids to human. beings.* But these are sporadic tales on Keltic soil. On the other hand, in the Germanic North, the water and the land swarm with wondrous creatures, either in the shape of bulls and horses, or in the guise of beautiful Nixes, who, unlike the southern ones generally, do not end in a fishy form, but are throughout of human shape, and longingly bent upon the intermixture with mankind.

Of these and their higher divine connection, as well as of the philosophical meaning of the Teutonic water-cult, the next article will give an account. A further comparison will then be drawn between the Scottish, Shetlandic, and other Germanic water-tales. Proof will also be adduced that, even as the Norse Acsir are no doubt related to the Vedic Asuras, so the Teutonic Vaenir, or Water-deities, of whom the Edda speaks, bear in their very name the trace of connection with ancient Indo-Aryan speech and mythology, and therefore really constituted an older or separate circle of Gods, before the Asa creed became the prevailing one among the Teuton race.

* "Fairy Legends." By T. Crofton Croker.

KARL BLIND,

MR.

HERBERT

SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY

AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.

II.

I.

WB

HILE Mr. Spencer's primary is his critical, his secondary or derivative is his constructive Philosophy. These stand more in accidental than essential relations, form two systems rather than one, a reasoned and integral whole. It is in his Secondary Philosophy that Mr. Spencer stands before us as a positive and creative thinker. It may be said to consist of two great doctrines-his theory of the Creational Cause and his theory of the Creational Method. The first is represented by his doctrine of Force, the second by his doctrine. of Evolution. These it is necessary to distinguish and hold distinct. In his exposition, indeed, the two are indissoluble, and, as it were, organically associated. Evolution is made a necessary deduction from the doctrine of Force, and the Cosmos a no less necessary deduction from their combined being and action. The inevitable logical alternatives appear to be-without Force no doctrine of Evolution is possible, with Evolution the doctrine as to Force is necessary. But the truth is, perhaps, rather the precise opposite-grant Evolution to be the creational Method, and Force must be denied to be the creational Cause.

There is to be no attempt here to question or deny the doctrine of Evolution; it is, indeed, frankly accepted. This does not mean that Mr. Spencer has discovered the formula in which it must be stated, or that his statement of it is correct and scientific, philosophical and exhaustive. It means very much the contrary; Mr. Spencer's doctrine is too à priori and, in the most comprehensive sense, unhistorical to be scientific, and is too narrow and one-sided, too entirely excludes certain factors necessary to the solution of the problem, to be philosophical. The more complex the processes become, the more violent and fantastic grow Mr. Spencer's application of his law, and the more unhistorical his interpretations. But this is to anticipate; it is enough, meanwhile,