Our author is apt to remonstrate with his anthropological critics, and to
assure them that he also has made studies in ethnology. 'I am not such a
despairer of ethnology as some ethnologists would have me.' He refers us
to the assistance which he lent in bringing out Dr. Hahn's Tsuni-Goam
(1881), Mr. Gill's Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (1876), and
probably other examples could be added. But my objection is, not that we
should be ungrateful to Mr. Max Muller for these and other valuable
services to anthropology, but that, when he has got his anthropological
material, he treats it in what I think the wrong way, or approves of its
being so treated.
Here, indeed, is the irreconcilable difference between two schools of
mythological interpretation. Given Dr. Hahn's book, on Hottentot manners
and religion: the anthropologist compares the Hottentot rites, beliefs,
social habits, and general ideas with those of other races known to him,
savage or civilised. A Hottentot custom, which has a meaning among
Hottentots, may exist where its meaning is lost, among Greeks or other
'Aryans.' A story of a Hottentot god, quite a natural sort of tale for a
Hottentot to tell, may be told about a god in Greece, where it is
contrary to the Greek spirit. We infer that the Greeks perhaps inherited
it from savage ancestors, or borrowed it from savages.