ed past in agricultural
usages, in archaic methods of allotment of land, in odd marriage customs,
things rudimentary--fossil relics, as it were, of an early social and
political condition. The archaeologist and the student of Institutions
compare these relics, material or customary, with the weapons, pottery,
implements, or again with the habitual law and usage of existing savage
or barbaric races, and demonstrate that our weapons and tools, and our
laws and manners, have been slowly evolved out of lower conditions, even
out of savage conditions.

The anthropological method in mythology is the same. In civilised
religion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite and
creed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality,
philosophy, and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things,
so out of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and rites
of the lower races, even of cannibals; but _there_ the creeds and rites
are _not_ incongruous with their environment of knowledge and culture.
There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headed spear or
marriage by capture. We argue, therefore, that religions and mythical
faiths and rituals which, among Greeks and Indians, are inexplicably
incongruous have lived on from an age in which they were natural and
inevitable, an age of savagery.

That is our general position, and it would have been a benefit to us if
Mr. Max Muller had stated it in his own luminous way, if he wished to
oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meet the
requirements of scientific method. In place of doing this once for all,
he often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defences of our
evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundred years. He
attacks the excesses of which some sweet anthropological enthusiasts have
been guilty or may be guilty, such as seeing totems wherever they find
beasts in ancient religion, myth, or art. He asks for definitions (as of
totemism), but never, I think, alludes to the authoritative definitions
by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails the theory of fetishism as if
it stood now where De Brosses left it in a purely pioneer work--or,
rather, where he understands De Brosses to have left it. One might as
well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius left it, or the theory of
evolution where it was left by the elder Darwin.

Thus Mr. Max Muller really never conies to grips with