Edwin Sidney Hartland's The Legend of Perseus moves beyond a single myth into a sweeping investigation of folklore's hidden logic. Here, the mysterious "life-token" becomes a key to understanding how people have imagined the bond between body and object, person and place, life and death. Across tales from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, plants, rings, knives, rosaries, handkerchiefs, cups, and other keepsakes wither, stain, rust, bleed, or break when their owner is harmed, while flourishing growth signals safety and vitality. Hartland distinguishes tokens with an original organic link to the hero from more arbitrary signs, then traces both through stories of trees, flowers, blood, bones, breast-milk, and other bodily traces that externalize a human life into a living emblem. He also explores enchanted mirrors, crystals, sacred wells, and reflective waters that reveal distant scenes, hidden truths, the fate of the sick, or the condition of an absent loved one. Interwoven with these studies are rites of friendship, brotherhood, hospitality, marriage, funerary custom, and kinship, revealing a rich comparative study of sympathetic magic, ritual, and belief. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.