terial for semi-deities. Then come sky,
stars, dawn, sun and moon: 'in these we have the germs of what,
hereafter, we shall have to call by the name of deities.'

Before we can transmute, with Mr. Mueller, these objects of a somewhat
vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noire's
philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the
development of personification and of religion. Noire's philological
theories are still, I presume, under discussion. They are necessary,
however, to Mr. Mueller's doctrine of the development of the vague
'sense of the infinite' (wakened by fine old trees, and high
mountains) into _devas_, and of _devas_ (which means 'shining ones')
into the Vedic gods. Our troglodyte ancestors, and their sweet feeling
for the spiritual aspect of landscape, are thus brought into relation
with the Rishis of the Vedas, the sages and poets of a pleasing
civilisation. The reverence felt for such comparatively refined or
remote things as fire, the sun, wind, thunder, the dawn, furnished a
series of stepping-stones to the Vedic theology, if theology it can be
called. It is impossible to give each step in detail; the process must
be studied in Mr. Mueller's lectures. Nor can we discuss the later
changes of faith. As to the processes which produced the fetichistic
'corruption' (that universal and everywhere identical form of decay),
Mr. Mueller does not afford even a hint. He only says that, when the
Indians found that their old gods were mere names, 'they built out of
the scattered bricks a new altar to the Unknown God'--a statement
which throws no light on the parasitical development of fetichism. But
his whole theory is deficient if, having called fetichism a
_corruption_, he does not show how corruption arose, how it operated,
and how the disease attacked all religions everywhere.

We have contested, step by step, many of Mr. Mueller's propositions. If
space permitted, it would be interesting to examine the actual
attitude of certain contemporary savages, Bushmen and others, towards
the sun. Contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not
primitive, but their _legends_, at least, are the oldest things they
possess. The supernatural elements in their ideas about the sun are
curiously unlike those which, according to Mr. Mueller, entered into
the development of Aryan religion.

The last remark which has to be made about Mr. Mueller's scheme of the
development