ncestors of Aryans
and Semites were once in the same stage as the 'negroes of the West Coast
of Africa are to-day.' These honest fellows are well acquainted with
coined money, with the use of firearms, and other resources of
civilisation, and have been in touch with missionaries, Miss Kingsley,
traders, and tourists. The ancestors of the Aryans and Semites enjoyed
no such advantages. Mr. Max Muller does not tell us who says that they
did. But that the ancestors of all mankind passed through a stage in
which they had to develop for themselves tools, languages, clothes, and
institutions, is assuredly the belief of anthropologists. A race without
tools, language, clothes, pottery, and social institutions, or with these
in the shape of undeveloped speech, stone knives, and 'possum or other
skins, is what we call a race of savages. Such we believe the ancestors
of mankind to have been--at any rate after the Fall.

Now when Mr. Max Muller began to write his book, he accepted this
postulate of anthropology (i. 15). When he reached i. 197 he abandoned
and denounced this postulate.

I quote his acceptance of the postulate (i. 15):--

'Even Mr. A. Lang has to admit that we have not got much beyond
Fontenelle, when he wrote in the last century:

'"Why are the legends [myths] about men, beasts, and gods so wildly
incredible and revolting? . . . The answer is that the earliest men
were in a state of almost inconceivable ignorance and savagery, and
that the Greeks inherited their myths from people in the same savage
stage (en un pareil etat de sauvagerie). Look at the Kaffirs and
Iroquois if you want to know what the earliest men were like, and
remember that the very Iroquois and Kaffirs have a long past behind
them"'--that is to say, are polite and cultivated compared to the
earliest men of all.

Here is an uncompromising statement by Fontenelle of the postulate that
the Greeks (an Aryan people) must have passed through the same stage as
modern savages--Kaffirs and Iroquois--now occupy. But (i. 15) Mr. Max
Muller eagerly accepts the postulate:--

'There is not a word of Fontenelle's to which I should not gladly
subscribe; there is no advice of his which I have not tried to follow
in all my attempts to explain the myths of India and Greece by an
occasional reference to Polynesian or African folklore.'

Well, if Mr. Max Muller 'gladly subscribes,' in p. 15, to the postulate