Families and whole villages suddenly drop words and manufacture others in their places out of mere caprice or superstition, and a few years' separation suffices to produce a marked dialectic difference.

In their copious forms and facility of reproduction they remind one of those anomalous animals, in whom, when a limb is lopped, it rapidly grows again, or even if cut in pieces each part will enter on a separate life quite unconcerned about his fellows.
But as the naturalist is far from regarding this superabundant vitality as a characteristic of a higher type, so the philologist justly assigns these tongues a low position in the linguistic scale.

Fidelity to form, here as everywhere, is the test of excellence.

At the outset, we divine there can be nothing very subtle in the mythologies of nations with such languages.

Much there must be that will be obscure, much that is vague, an exhausting variety in repetition, and a strong tendency to lose the idea in the symbol.
What definiteness of outline might be preserved must depend on the care with which the old stories of the gods were passed from one person and one generation to another.