y the material 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. Muller, 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. Muller'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. Muller'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. Muller 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. Muller'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. Muller, entered into the development of
Aryan religion.

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