to us are clearly the names of the agents behind the salient phenomena of Nature, in some cases quite intelligible, in others easily restored to their original meaning.’  The meanings of the names not being forgotten, but obvious, there is no disease of language.  All this does not illustrate the case of Greek divine names by resemblance, but by difference.  Real scholars know what Mordvinian divine names mean.  They do not know what many Greek divine names mean—­as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute about Demeter.

No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods exist.  We are only fighting against the philological effort to get at the elemental phenomena which may be behind Hera, Artemis, Athene, Apollo, by means of contending etymological conjectures.  We only oppose the philological attempt to account for all the features in a god’s myth as manifestations of the elemental qualities denoted by a name which may mean at pleasure dawn, storm, clear air, thunder, wind, twilight, water, or what you will.  Granting Chkai to be the sun, does that explain why he punishes people who bake bread on Friday? (237.) Our opponent does not seem to understand the portee of our objections.  The same remarks apply to the statement of Finnish mythology here given, and familiar in the Kalewala.  Departmental divine beings of natural phenomena we find everywhere, or nearly everywhere, in company, of course, with other elements of belief—­totemism, worship of spirits, perhaps with monotheism in the background.  That is as much our opinion as Mr. Max Muller’s.  What we are opposing is the theory of disease of language, and the attempt to explain, by philological conjectures, gods and heroes whose obscure names are the only sources of information.

Helios is the sun-god; he is, or lives in, the sun.  Apollo may have been the sun-god too, but we still distrust the attempts to prove this by contending guesses at the origin of his name.  Moreover, if all Greek gods could be certainly explained, by undisputed etymologies, as originally elemental, we still object to such logic as that which turns Saranyu into ‘grey dawn.’  We still object to the competing interpretations by which almost every detail of very composite myths is explained as a poetical description of some elemental process or phenomenon.  Apollo may once have been the sun, but why did he make love as a dog?

Lettish Mythology

These remarks apply equally well to our author’s dissertation on Lettish mythology (ii. 430 et seq.).  The meaning of statements about the sun and sky ‘is not to be mistaken in the mythology of the Letts.’  So here is no disease of language.  The meaning is not to be mistaken.  Sun and moon and so on are spoken of by their natural unmistakable names, or in equally unmistakable poetical periphrases, as in riddles.  The daughter of the sun hung a red