to show that Daphne, the laurel tree, was an old
name for the dawn, and that Phoibos was one of the many names
of the sun, who pursued the dawn till she vanished before his
rays. Of these two schools, the former has always appealed to
the mythologies of savage nations, as showing that gods and
heroes were originally human beings, worshipped after their
death as ancestors and as gods, while the latter has confined
itself chiefly to an etymological analysis of mythological
names in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and other languages,
such as had been sufficiently studied to admit of a
scientific, grammatical, and etymological treatment.

This is a long text for our remarks on Hottentot mythology; but it is
necessary to prove that there are not two schools only of
mythologists: that there are inquirers who neither follow the path of
Abbe Banier, nor of the philologists, but a third way, unknown to, or
ignored by Mr. Mueller. We certainly were quite unaware that Banier and
Euhemeros were very specially concerned, as Mr. Mueller thinks, with
savage mythology; but it is by aid of savage myths that the school
unknown to Mr. Mueller examines the myths of civilised people like the
Greeks. The disciples of Mr. Mueller interpret all the absurdities of
Greek myth, the gods who are beasts on occasion, the stars who were
men, the men who become serpents or deer, the deities who are
cannibals and parricides and adulterers, as the result of the
influence of Aryan speech upon Aryan thought. Men, in Mr. Mueller's
opinion, had originally pure ideas about the gods, and expressed them
in language which we should call figurative. The figures remained,
when their meaning was lost; the names were then supposed to be gods,
the _nomina_ became _numina_, and out of the inextricable confusion of
thought which followed, the belief in cannibal, bestial, adulterous,
and incestuous gods was evolved. That is Mr. Mueller's hypothesis; with
him the evolution, a result of a disease of language, has been from
early comparative purity to later religious abominations. Opposed to
him is what may be called the school of Mr. Herbert Spencer: the
modern Euhemerism, which recognises an element of historical truth in
myths, as if the characters had been real characters, and which, in
most gods, beholds ancestral ghosts raised to a higher power.

There remains a third system of mythical interpretation, though Mr.
Mueller says o