Influence of Natural Environment.—Uudoubtedly, other causes were also at work in the building of mythologies. Of these, the na-hAra/ envi ronment has by some been deemed of great weight. The historian Buckle considered it the most potent of all, and undertook to show that where earthquakes and other violent and destructive exhibitions of the natural forces occur, the religious sentiment becomes excited and its imagina tive creations more numerous. To a certain extent there can be no ques tion about this. In proportion as men's lives and fortunes depend on the blind forces of nature they become superstitious. Sailors are notoriously so. Travellers ill the Andes, where terrible thunderstorms are frequent, report the natives as overwhelmed with fright at their approach and resorting to all manner of charms and vows. The god of the tropical cyclone in the West Indies, by name Huracan (whence our word hurri cane), was the chief divinity over a wide area. The earthquake and the volcano were intensely dreaded by the natives and placated by the cruelest sacrifices. Every year in Nicaragua maidens were selected from the vil lages and hurled alive into the boiling crater of the active volcano of Managua.
Every mythology bears the impress of the natural scenes in which it was developed. The nature-worship of the Greeks, with its thousands of
tales representing the history of the rich vegetable life of their fertile and sea-bathed peninsula, was impossible in the arid and monotonous deserts of Arabia. The solar myths which the Indo-Aryans devised in the sun smitten southern valleys would be incomprehensible to the residents of the Arctic zone.
Influence of National is also a marked contrast between nations in the strength of their imagination. Some are story tellers and poets from the cradle ; others are sober and prosaic in all their conversation. The Mongolians as a race have little ideality, and their mythology is sterile. The ancient Italian religion was overladen with divinities, often with the most trivial distinctions ; for instance, there was a god for ploughing the furrows straight, and another for cross-ploughing! But mythology there was none. The Oscan and Latin people were hope lessly prosaic. During her long history Rome never produced an artist of the first class, never a lyric poet that did not draw his inspiration from Greece. The creative power was denied to that nation, and the figures of its native pantheon are thin, vapid, and unreal.