board? It was 'the fact that, while in the earliest accessible
documents of religious thought we look in vain for any very clear
traces of fetichism, they become more and more frequent everywhere in
the later stages of religious development, and are certainly more
visible in the later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning
with the Atharva_n_a, than in the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda.'
Now, by the earliest accessible documents of religious thought,
Professor Max Mueller means the hymns of the Rig Veda. These hymns are
composed in the most elaborate metre, by sages of old repute, who, I
presume, occupied a position not unlike that of the singers and seers
of Israel. They lived in an age of tolerably advanced cultivation.
They had wide geographical knowledge. They had settled government.
They dwelt in States. They had wealth of gold, of grain, and of
domesticated animals. Among the metals, they were acquainted with that
which, in most countries, has been the latest worked--they used iron
poles in their chariots. How then can the hymns of the most
enlightened singers of a race thus far developed be called 'the
earliest religious documents'? Oldest they may be, the oldest that are
accessible, but this is a very different thing. How can we possibly
argue that what is absent in these hymns, is absent because it had not
yet come into existence? Is it not the very office of _pii vates et
Phoebo digna locuti_ to purify religion, to cover up decently its rude
shapes, as the unhewn stone was concealed in the fane of Apollo of
Delos? If the race whose noblest and oldest extant hymns were pure,
exhibits traces of fetichism in its later documents, may not that as
easily result from a recrudescence as from a corruption? Professor Max
Mueller has still, moreover, to explain how the process of corruption
which introduced the same fetichistic practices among Samoyeds,
Brazilians, Kaffirs, and the people of the Atharva_n_a Veda came to be
everywhere identical in its results.

Here an argument often urged against the anthropological method may be
shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do
you know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that
their whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and
decadent from an earlier standard?' Mr. Mueller glances at this
argument, which, however, cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Mueller has
recognised that savage, or 'nomadic,' languages represent