are good for. Whether they are products of nature or works of man, if only there is no doubt as to their genuineness, they claim and most readily receive the attention, not only of the learned, but also of the intelligent public at large.

Now, what are these Myths and Songs which Mr. W. W. Gill has brought home from Mangaia, but antiquities, preserved for hundreds, it may be for thousands of years, showing us, far better than any stone weapons or stone idols, the growth of the human mind during a period which, as yet, is full of the most perplexing problems to the psychologist, the historian, and the theologian? The only hope of our ever unravelling the perplexities of that mythological period, or that mythopoeic phase of the human intellect, lies in our gaining access to every kind of collateral evidence. We know that mythopoeic period among the Aryan and Semitic races, but we know it from a distance only, and where are we to look now for living myths and legends, except among those who still think and speak mythologically, who are, in fact, at the present moment what the Hindus were before the collection of their sacred hymns, and the Greeks long before the days of Homer? To find ourselves among a people who really believe in gods and heroes and ancestral spirits, who still offer human sacrifices, who in some cases devour their human victims, or, at all events, burn the flesh of animals on their altars, trusting that the scent will be sweet to the nostrils of their gods, is as if the zoologist could spend a few days among the megatheria,

or the botanist among the waving ferns of the forests, buried beneath our feet. So much is written just now, and has been written during the last fifty years, on human archæology, on the growth and progress of the intellect, on the origin of religion, on the first beginnings of social institutions; so many theories have been started, so many generalizations put forward with perfect confidence, that one might almost imagine that all the evidence was before us, and no more new light could be expected from anywhere. But the very contrary is the case. There are many regions still to be explored, there are many facts, now put forward as certain, which require the most careful inspection, and as we read again and again the minute descriptions of the journey which man is supposed to have made from station to station, from his childhood to his manhood, or, it may be, his old age, it is difficult to resist a feeling of amazement, and to suppress at almost every page the exclamation, Wait! wait!

There are the two antagonistic schools, each holding its tenets with a kind of religious fervour the one believing in a descending, the other in an ascending, development of the human race; the one asserting that the history of the human mind begins of necessity with a state of purity and simplicity which gradually gives way to corruption, perversity, and savagery; the other maintaining with equal confidence, that the first human beings could not have been more than one step above the animals, and that their whole history is one of progress towards higher perfection. With

regard to the beginnings of religion, the one school holds to a primitive suspicion of something that is beyond-call it supernatural, transcendent, or divine. It considers a silent walking across this jhúla* of life, with eyes fixed on high, as a more perfect realisation of primitive religion than singing of Vedic hymns, offerof Jewish sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds and articles. The other begins with the purely animal and passive nature of man,

* " So, on the 12th of August, we made the steep ascent to the village of Namgea, and from there to a very unpleasant jhúla, which crosses the foaming torrent of the Sutlej. In this part of the Himálaya, and, indeed, on to Kashmir, these bridges are constructed of twigs, chiefly from birch trees or bushes, twisted together. Two thick ropes of these twigs, about the size of a man's thigh, or a little larger, are stretched across the river, at a distance of about six to four feet from each other, and a similar rope runs between them, three or four feet lower, being connected with the upper ropes by more slender ropes, also usually of birch twigs twisted together, but sometimes of grass, and occurring at an interval of about five feet from each other. The unpleasantness of a jhúla is that the passenger has no proper hold of the upper ropes, which are too thick and rough to be grasped by the hand; and that, at the extremities, they are so far apart that it is difficult to have any hold of both at the same time; while the danger is increased by the bend or hang of the jhúla, which is much lower in the middle than at its ends. He has also to stoop painfully in order to move along it, and it is seldom safe for him to rest his feet on the lower rope, except where it is supported from the upper ropes by the transverse To fall into the raging torrent underneath would be almost certain destruction. The high wind which usually prevails in the Himálaya during the day, makes the whole structure swing about frightfully. In the middle of the bridge there is a cross-bar of wood (to keep the two upper ropes separate) which has to be stepped over; and it is not customary to repair a jhúla until some one falls through it, and so gives practical demonstration that it is in rather a rotten condition.”—ANDRew Wilson, “The Abode of Snow,” p. 197.

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and tries to show how the repeated impressions of the world in which he lived, drove him to fetichism, whatever that may mean, to ancestor-worship, to a worship of nature, of trees and serpents, of mountains and rivers, of clouds and meteors, of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven, and at last, by what is called a natural mistake, of One who dwells in heaven above.

There is some truth in every one of these views; but they become untrue by being generalized. The time has not come yet, it probably never will come, when we shall be able to assert anything about the real beginnings of religion in general. We know a little here, a little there, but whatever we know of early religion, we always see that it presupposes vast periods of an earlier development.

Some people imagine that fetichism, at all events, presupposes nothing: they would probably not hesitate to ascribe to some of the higher animals the faculty of fetich-worship. But few words are so devoid of scientific precision as fetichism, a term first rendered popular by the writings of De Brosses. Let us suppose

that it means a kind of temporary worship of any material object which the fancy may happen to select, as a tree, a stone, a post, an animal:—can that be called a primitive form of religion? First of all, religion is one thing, worship another, and the two are by no means necessarily connected. But, even if they were, what is the meaning of worship paid to a stone, but the outward sign of a

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pre-existent belief that this stone is more than a stone, something supernatural, it may be something divine, so that the ideas of the supernatural and the divine, instead of growing out of fetichism, are generally, if not always, presupposed by it? The same applies to ancestor-worship, which not only presupposes the conceptions of immortality and of the ideal unity of a family, but implies in many cases a belief that the spirits of the departed are worthy to share the honours paid to divine beings.

To maintain that all religion begins with fetichism, all mythology with ancestor-worship, is simply untrue, as far as our present knowledge goes. There is fetichism, there is ancestor-worship, there is nature-worship, whether of trees or serpents, of mountains or rivers, of clouds and meteors, of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven; there is all this, and there is much more than all this, wherever we can watch the early growth of religious ideas : but, what we have to learn is, first of all, to distinguish, to study each religion, each mythology, each form of worship by itself, to watch them during successive periods of their growth and decay, to follow them through different strata of society, and before all, to have each of them, as much as possible, studied in their own language.

If language is the realization of thought and feeling, the importance of a knowledge of the language for a correct appreciation of what it was meant to convey in the expression of religious