Philological mythologists prefer to believe that the forgotten meaning of
words produced the results; that the wolf-born Apollo ([Greek])
originally meant 'Light-born Apollo,' {82b} and that the wolf came in
from a confusion between [Greek], 'Light,' and [Greek], a wolf. I make
no doubt that philologists can explain Sminthian Apollo, the Dog-Apollo,
and all the rest in the same way, and account for all the other
peculiarities of place-names, myths, works of art, local badges, and so
forth. We must then, I suppose, infer that these six traits of the
mouse, already enumerated, tally with the traces which actual totemism
would or might leave surviving behind it, or which propitiation of mice
might leave behind it, by a chance coincidence, determined by forgotten
meanings of words. The Greek analogy to totemistic facts would be
explained, (1) either by asking for a definition of totemism, and not
listening when it is given; or (2) by maintaining that savage totemism is
also a result of a world-wide malady of language, which, in a hundred
tongues, produced the same confusions of thought, and consequently the
same practices and institutions. Nor do I for one moment doubt that the
ingenuity of philologists could prove the name of every beast and plant,
in every language under heaven, to be a name for the 'inevitable dawn'
(Max Muller), or for the inevitable thunder, or storm, or lightning (Kuhn-
Schwartz). But as names appear to yield storm, lightning, night, or dawn
with equal ease and certainty, according as the scholar prefers dawn or
storm, I confess that this demonstration would leave me sceptical. It
lacks scientific exactitude.