which are taller than we are, ’whose roots are beyond our reach, and which have a kind of life in them.’  ’We are dealing with a quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,’ says Mr. Muller.  If a tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree was taller than he, or had ‘a kind of life,’ ’an unknown and unknowable, yet undeniable something’? {233b} Why, this is the sentiment of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated period!  A troglodyte would look for a ’possum in the tree, he would tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs, or he would worship anything odd in the branches.  Is Mr. Muller not unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical meaning, or if boilyas lived in its boughs, but whose practical way of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem, chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and leaves as they happened to come handy?

Mr. Muller has a long list of semi-tangible objects ’overwhelming and overawing,’ like the tree.  There are mountains, where ’even a stout heart shivers before the real presence of the infinite’; there are rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is earth.  These supply the material for semi-deities.  Then come sky, stars, dawn, sun, and moon:  ’in these we have the germs of what, hereafter, we shall have to call by the name of deities.’

Before we can transmute, with Mr. Muller, these objects of a somewhat vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noire’s philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the development of personification and of religion.  Noire’s philological theories are still, I presume, under discussion.  They are necessary, however, to Mr. Muller’s doctrine of the development of the vague ’sense of the infinite’ (wakened by fine old trees, and high mountains) into devas, and of devas (which means ‘shining ones’) into the Vedic gods.  Our troglodyte ancestors, and their sweet feeling for the spiritual aspect of landscape, are thus brought into relation with the Rishis of the Vedas, the sages and poets of a pleasing civilisation.  The reverence felt for such comparatively refined or remote things as fire, the sun, wind, thunder, the dawn, furnished a series of stepping-stones to the Vedic theology, if theology it can be called.  It is impossible to give each step in detail; the process must be studied in Mr. Muller’s lectures.  Nor can we discuss the later changes of faith.  As to the processes which produced the fetichistic ‘corruption’ (that universal and everywhere identical form of decay), Mr. Muller does not afford even a hint.  He only says that, when the Indians found that their old gods were mere names, ’they built out of the scattered bricks a new altar to the Unknown God’—­a statement which throws no light on the parasitical development of fetichism.  But his whole theory is deficient if, having called fetichism a corruption, he does not show how corruption arose, how it operated, and how the disease attacked all religions everywhere.