Homeric hymns.

But the great majority of Vedic hymns consists in simple invocations
of the fire, the water, the sky, the sun, and the storms, often under
the same names which afterward became the proper names of Hindu
deities, but as yet nearly free from all that can be called irrational
or mythological. There is nothing irrational, nothing I mean we cannot
enter into or sympathize with, in people imploring the storms to
cease, or the sky to rain, or the sun to shine. I say there is nothing
irrational in it, though perhaps it might be more accurate to say
that there is nothing in it that would surprise anybody who is
acquainted with the growth of human reason, or at all events, of
childish reason. It does not matter how we call the tendency of the
childish mind to confound the manifestation with that which manifests
itself, effect with cause, act with agent. Call it Animism,
Personification, Metaphor, or Poetry, we all know what is meant by it,
in the most general sense of all these names; we all know that it
exists, and the youngest child who beats the chair against which he
has fallen, or who scolds his dog, or who sings: "Rain, rain, go to
Spain," can teach us that, however irrational all this may seem to us,
it is perfectly rational, natural, ay inevitable in the first periods,
or the childish age of the human mind.

Now it is exactly this period in the growth of ancient religion, which
was always presupposed or postulated, but was absent everywhere else,
that is clearly put before us in the hymns of the Rig-Veda. It is this
ancient chapter in the history of the human mind which has been
preserved to us in Indian literature, while we look for it in vain in
Greece or Rome or elsewhere.

It has been a favorite idea of those who call themselves "students of
man," or anthropologists, that in order to know the earliest or
so-called prehistoric phases in the growth of man, we should study the
life of savage nations, as we may watch it still in some parts of
Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and America.

There is much truth in this, and nothing can be more useful than the
observations which we find collected in the works of such students as
Waitz, Tylor, Lubbock, and many others. But let us be honest, and
confess, first of all, that the materials on which we have here to
depend are often extremely untrustworthy.

Nor is this all. What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last
chapter of their history? Do we ever get an in