Yes, our critic may reply, 'but Mr. Curr thinks that there is a strong
tendency in observers abroad, if they have become acquainted with a new
and startling theory that has become popular at home, to see
confirmations of it everywhere.' So I had explicitly stated in
commenting on Dr. Tylor's test of recurrences. {101b} 'Travellers and
missionaries have begun to read anthropological books, and their evidence
is, therefore, much more likely to be biassed now by anthropological
theories than it was of old.' So Mr. McLennan, in the very earliest of
all writings on totemism, said: 'As the totem has not till now got itself
mixed up with speculations the observers have been unbiassed.' Mr.
McLennan finally declined to admit any evidence as to the savage marriage
laws collected after his own theory, and other theories born from it, had
begun to bias observers of barbaric tribes.
It does not quite seem to me that Mr. Max Muller makes his audience
acquainted with these precautions of anthropologists, with their sedulous
sifting of evidence, and watchfulness against the theoretical bias of
observers. Thus he assails the faible, not the fort of our argument, and
may even seem not to be aware that we have removed the faible by careful
discrimination.
What opinion must his readers, who know not Mr. McLennan's works,
entertain about that acute and intrepid pioneer, a man of warm temper, I
admit, a man who threw out his daringly original theory at a heat, using
at first such untrustworthy materials as lay at hand, but a man whom
disease could not daunt, and whom only death prevented from building a
stately edifice on the soil which he was the first to explore?
Our author often returns to the weakness of the evidence of travellers
and missionaries.