cloak on a great oak-tree.  This ’can hardly have been meant for anything but the red of the evening or the setting sun, sometimes called her red cloak’ (ii. 439).  Exactly so, and the Australians of Encounter Bay also think that the sun is a woman.  ’She has a lover among the dead, who has given her a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising.’ {135} This tale was told to Mr. Meyer in 1846, before Mr. Max Muller’s Dawn had become ‘inevitable,’ as he says.

The Lettish and Australian myths are folk-poetry; they have nothing to do with a disease of language or forgotten meanings of words which become proper names.  All this is surely distinct.  We proclaim the abundance of poetical Nature-myths; we ‘disable’ the hypothesis that they arise from a disease of language.

The Chances of Fancy

One remark has to be added.  Mannhardt regarded many or most of the philological solutions of gods into dawn or sun, or thunder or cloud, as empty jeux d’esprit.  And justly, for there is no name named among men which a philologist cannot easily prove to be a synonym or metaphorical term for wind or weather, dawn or sun.  Whatever attribute any word connotes, it can be shown to connote some attribute of dawn or sun.  Here parody comes in, and gives a not overstrained copy of the method, applying it to Mr. Gladstone, Dr. Nansen, or whom you please.  And though a jest is not a refutation, a parody may plainly show the absolutely capricious character of the philological method.

ARTEMIS

I do not here examine our author’s constructive work.  I have often criticised its logical method before, and need not repeat myself.  The etymologies, of course, I leave to be discussed by scholars.  As we have seen, they are at odds on the subject of phonetic laws and their application to mythological names.  On the mosses and bogs of this Debatable Land some of them propose to erect the science of comparative mythology.  Meanwhile we look on, waiting till the mosses shall support a ponderous edifice.

Our author’s treatment of Artemis, however, has for me a peculiar interest (ii. 733-743).  I really think that it is not mere vanity which makes me suppose that in this instance I am at least one of the authors whom Mr. Max Muller is writing about without name or reference.  If so, he here sharply distinguishes between me on the one hand and ’classical scholars’ on the other, a point to which we shall return.  He says—­I cite textually (ii. 732):—­

Artemis

’The last of the great Greek goddesses whom we have to consider is Artemis.  Her name, we shall see, has received many interpretations, but none that can be considered as well established—­none that, even if it were so, would help us much in disentangling the many myths told about her.  Easy to understand as her character seems when we confine our attention to Homer, it becomes extremely complicated when we take into account the numerous local forms of worship of which she was the object.