A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang, and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel.  Lang’s clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently describes as the philologists—­and they do indeed form part of that camp—­have had the effect of bringing ‘philological theories’ into sad disrepute with sciolists and ‘common-sense’ people.  But the sun-myths and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists.  On the other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures are eoian or solar in origin?  Can any one question that Vivasvant the ‘wide gleaming’ is sun or bright sky, as he is represented in the Avesta and Rig Veda?  Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly figure, made out of this god.  Or is Mr. Lang ignorant that the god Yima became Jemshid, and that Feridun is only the god Trita?  It undoubtedly is correct to illuminate the past with other light than that of sun or dawn, yet that these lights have shone and have been quenched in certain personalities may be granted without doing violence to scientific principles.  All purely etymological mythology is precarious, but one may recognize sun-myths without building a system on the basis of a Dawn-Helen, and without referring Ilium to the Vedic bila.  Again, myths about gods, heroes, and fairies are to be segregated.  Even in India, which teems with it, there is little, if any, folklore that can be traced to solar or dawn-born myths.  Mr. Lang represents a healthy reaction against too much sun-myth, but we think that there are sun-myths still, and that despite his protests all religion is not grown from one seed.

There remains the consideration of the second part of the double problem which was formulated above—­the method of interpretation.  The native method is to believe the scholiasts’ explanations, which often are fanciful and, in all important points, totally unreliable; since the Hindu commentators lived so long after the period of the literature they expound that the tradition they follow is useful only in petty details.  From a modern point of view the question of interpretation depends mainly on whether one regard the Rig Veda as but an Indic growth, the product of the Hindu mind alone, or as a work that still retains from an older age ideas which, having once been common to Hindu and Iranian, should be compared with those in the Persian Avesta and be illustrated by them.  Again, if this latter hypothesis be correct, how is one to interpret an apparent likeness, here and there, between Indic and foreign notions,—­is it possible that the hymns were composed, in part, before the advent of the authors into India, and is it for this reason that in the Rig Veda are contained certain names, ideas, and legends, which do not seem to be native to India?  On the other hand, if one adopt the theory that the Rig Veda is wholly a native work, in how far is he to suppose that it is separable from Brahmanic formalism?  Were the hymns made independently of any ritual, as their own excuse for being, or were they composed expressly for the sacrifice, as part of a formal cult?