As these volumes appear one by one they afford a vast field not only for comparative study of mythologies of various races. They offer also a fruitful field where the varying forms of expression of the same impulses of human lives play over a wide surface and grow abundantly under many climes and conditions. There is a striking similarity in the themes or motives which manifest themselves through the mythologies of the most varied and the most remote peoples. There is a marked abundance of the same sort of symbolism which is utilized to give expression to the same elements of belief, worship, conflict. All of these represent the adjustment of the human race, under whatever external conditions, to the world in which it lives and its reactions in its interrelations man with man. And after all what is life and what constitutes human history but the sum of just such striving after adjustment? This