“frog."’ At what historical period the Sanskrit-speaking race was settled in seats where the sun rose and set in water, we do not know, and ‘chapter and verse’ are needed for the statement that ‘frog’ was actually a name of the sun.  Mr. Muller’s argument, however, is that the sun was called ‘the frog,’ that people forgot that the frog and sun were identical, and that Frog, or Bheki, was mistaken for the name of a girl to whom was applied the old saw about dying at sight of water.  ‘And so,’ says Mr. Muller, ’the change from sun to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the mere spell of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to miraculous charms more familiar to a later age.’  As a matter of fact, magical metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest savages than to people in a ‘later age.’  Magic, as Castren observes, ’belongs to the lowest known stages of civilisation.’  Mr. Muller’s theory, however, is this—­that a Sanskrit-speaking people, living where the sun rose out of and set in some ocean, called the sun, as he touched the water, Bheki, the frog, and said he would die at the sight of water.  They ceased to call the sun the frog, or Bheki, but kept the saying, ’Bheki will die at sight of water.’  Not knowing who or what Bheki might be, they took her for a frog, who also was a pretty wench.  Lastly, they made the story of Bheki’s distinguished wedding and mysterious disappearance.  For this interpretation, historical and linguistic evidence is not offered.  When did a Sanskrit-speaking race live beside a great sea?  How do we know that ‘frog’ was used as a name for ‘sun’?

* * * * *

We have already given our explanation.  To the savage intellect, man and beast are on a level, and all savage myth makes men descended from beasts; while stories of the loves of gods in bestial shape, or the unions of men and animals, incessantly occur.  ‘Unnatural’ as these notions seem to us, no ideas are more familiar to savages, and none recur more frequently in Indo-Aryan, Scandinavian, and Greek mythology.  An extant tribe in North-West America still claims descent from a frog.  The wedding of Bheki and the king is a survival, in Sanskrit, of a tale of this kind.  Lastly, Bheki disappears, when her associations with her old amphibious life are revived in the manner she had expressly forbidden.

* * * * *

Our interpretation may be supported by an Ojibway parallel.  A hunter named Otter-heart, camping near a beaver lodge, found a pretty girl loitering round his fire.  She keeps his wigwam in order, and ’lays his blanket near the deerskin she had laid for herself.  “Good,” he muttered, “this is my wife."’ She refuses to eat the beavers he has shot, but at night he hears a noise, ‘krch, krch, as if beavers were gnawing wood.’  He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling birch twigs.  In fact, the good little wife is a beaver, as the pretty Indian