lowed, the belief in cannibal,
bestial, adulterous, and incestuous gods was evolved. That is Mr.
Muller'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.
Muller says only two methods are possible. The method, in this third
case, is to see whether the irrational features and elements of civilised
Greek myth occur also in the myths of savages who speak languages quite
unlike those from whose diseases Mr. Muller derives the corruption of
religion. If the same features recur, are they as much in harmony with
the mental habits of savages, such as Bushmen and Hottentots, as they are
out of accord with the mental habits of civilised Greeks? If this
question can be answered in the affirmative, then it may be provisionally
assumed that the irrational elements of savage myth are the legacy of
savage modes of thought, and have survived in the religion of Greece from
a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were savages. But inquirers who
use this method do not in the least believe that either Greek or savage
gods were, for the more part, originally real men. Both Greeks and
savages have worshipped the ghosts of the dead. Both Greeks and savages
assign to their gods the miraculous powers of transformation and magic,
which savages also attribute to their conjurers or shamans. The mantle
(if he had a mantle) of the medicine-man has fallen on the god; but Zeus,
or Indra, was not once a real medicine-man. A number of factors combine
in the conception of Indra, or Zeus, as either god appears in Sanskrit or
Greek literature, of earlier or later date. Our school does not hold
anything so absurd as that Daphne was a real girl pursued by a young man.
But it has been observed that, among most savage races, metamorphoses
like that of Daphne not only exist in mythology, but are believed to
occur very frequently in actual life. Men and women are supposed to be
capable of turning into plants (as the bamboo in Sarawak), into animals,
and stones, and stars, and those metamorphoses happen as contemporary
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