en I wrote _Custom and Myth_.

In Miss Harrison's volume on Athenian Myths the student will find the
aetiological theory (namely, that many myths were invented to explain
obscure points of ritual) applied in a number of classical instances.
A singularly ingenious study of Roman myths is presented in Mr.
Jevons's edition of Plutarch's _Romaine Questions_ (Nutt). These are
recent instances of the use of the 'anthropological' method, first
firmly established by Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, and now holding
its own as a recognised instrument in the study of the historical
development of the imagination. In Rosscher's _Ausfuehrliches Lexikon_
of Greek and Roman mythology, the earlier method of the philologists
is usually adopted, and the work, still in course of publication, is
most useful for its recondite learning.

These notes are meant for the guidance of any reader who may care to
push his studies further than the sketches of the present volume.

On one or two points some remarks may be necessary. The author has
been not unnaturally accused of seeing Totems everywhere. He would
therefore protest that he does not regard every beast and bird which
appears in myths or in religious art as necessarily a Totem. But he
inclines to think that where Celts or Greeks claim descent from a god
who pursued his amours in animal shape, or where a tribe bears the
name of an animal, regards that animal with religious respect, and
places its effigy beside that of a god, the Totemistic hypothesis
colligates the phenomena, and deserves consideration. These and other
early features of religion occur mainly in Greece after the Homeric
age. It has been suggested, for example, by Mr. Walter Leaf, that
Homer's people, the Achaeans, were free from all such ideas as
Totemism, worship of the dead, ritual of purification for homicide,
the mysteries, and so forth. These were notions held by the Pelasgi,
and revived or retained by the Ionians, an older and distinct stock of
Pelasgian origin. I am unable to convince myself in this matter, not
knowing how much of the refinement in the Homeric poems is due to the
genius of the poet, who might ignore practices with which he was
familiar. They may have been Pelasgo-Ionians, who derived Helen's
birth from the Swan, or Homer may have chosen to slur over an Achaean
legend, and so on in other cases; for example, as to the descent of
the Myrmidons from Zeus in the shape of an Ant. On another point a
word