International Encyclopaedia of Mythology

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. There is nothing to equal this fantastic achievement in terms of the breadth of the coverage of Races. The comprehensive volumes are given to the myths of the ancient Celts, the Armenians, the East Indians and the mighty Persians, the Pagan tribes of Africa, the Chinese, the Indians, the Malayo-Polynasian people, and Australians, the American Indians, the Mexicans, the Egyptians, and the peoples of Burma, Siam,, and Annam, etc. The set pretty well succeeds in its goal to include all of humanity. The text is extremely detailed but very readable; none of the turgid prose so often associated with academia. The volumes contain numerous illustrations, both in the text and as plates. Louis Herbert Gray, PH.D. was an American Orientalist, born at Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton University, and from Columbia University (Ph.D.). Gray contributed to the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, with contributions on such topics as the Avestan texts. He served as American collaborator on the Orientalische Bibliographie; was associate editor of the Hastings Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh); editor of Mythology of all Races (1915-18); translated Subandhu’s Vasavadatta (1913); and afterwards served as professor at the University of Nebraska. He was one of the American commissioners to negotiate peace in Paris .Gray also published – Indo-Iranian Phonology; and The Hundred Songs of Kamal ad-Din of Isfahan.