Thus examined, it reveals the inevitable destinies of men and of nations as bound up with their forms of worship.
These general considerations appear to me to be needed for the proper understanding of the study I am about to make.

It concerns itself with some of the religions which were developed on the American continent before its discovery.

My object is to present from them a series of myths curiously similar in features, and to see if one simple and general explanation of them can be found.
The processes of myth-building among American tribes were much the same as elsewhere.

These are now too generally familiar to need specification here, beyond a few which I have found particularly noticeable.
At the foundation of all myths lies the mental process of _personification_, which finds expression in the rhetorical figure of _prosopopeia_.

The definition of this, however, must be extended from the mere representation of inanimate things as animate, to include also the representation of irrational beings as rational, as in the "animal myths," a most common form of religious story among primitive people.
Some languages favor these forms of personification much more than others, and most of the American languages do so in a marked manner, by the broad grammatical distinctions they draw between animate and inanimate objects, which distinctions must invariably be observed.