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.

Names of Savage Gods

This is the method, and if we can also get a scholar to analyse the names of Hottentot gods, we are all the luckier, that is, if his processes and inferences are logical.  May we not decide on the logic of scholars?  But, just as Mr. Max Muller points out to us the dangers attending our evidence, we point out to him the dangers attending his method.  In Dr. Hahn’s book, the doctor analyses the meaning of the name Tsuni-Goam and other names, discovers their original sense, and from that sense explains the myths about Hottentot divine beings.

Here we anthropologists first ask Mr. Max Muller, before accepting Dr. Hahn’s etymologies, to listen to other scholars about the perils and difficulties of the philological analysis of divine names, even in Aryan languages.  I have already quoted his ‘defender,’ Dr. Tiele.  ’The philological method is inadequate and misleading, when it is a question of (1) discovering the origin of a myth, or (2) the physical explanation of the oldest myths, or (3) of accounting for the rude and obscene element in the divine legends of civilised races.’

To the two former purposes Dr. Hahn applies the philological method in the case of Tsuni-Goam.  Other scholars agree with Dr. Tiele.  Mannhardt, as we said, held that Mr. Max Muller’s favourite etymological ‘equations,’ Sarameya=Hermeias; Saranyu=Demeter-Erinnys; Kentauros=Gandharvas and others, would not stand criticism.  ’The method in its practical working shows a lack of the historical sense,’ said Mannhardt.  Curtius—­a scholar, as Mr. Max Muller declares (i. 32)—­says, ’It is especially difficult to conjecture the meaning of proper names, and above all of local and mythical names.’ {106a} I do not see that it is easier when these names are not Greek, but Hottentot, or Algonquin!