; that a young man called Robin, or possibly a man with red
hair, pursued her, and that she hid behind a laurel tree that happened
to be there. This was the theory of Euhemeros, re-established by the
famous Abbe Bernier [Mr. Muller doubtless means Banier], and not quite
extinct even now. According to another school, the irrational element
in mythology is inevitable, and due to the influence of language on
thought, so that many of the legends of gods and heroes may be
rendered intelligible if only we can discover the original meaning of
their proper names. The followers of this school try to show that
Daphne, the laurel tree, was an old name for the dawn, and that
Phoibos was one of the many names of the sun, who pursued the dawn
till she vanished before his rays. Of these two schools, the former
has always appealed to the mythologies of savage nations, as showing
that gods and heroes were originally human beings, worshipped after
their death as ancestors and as gods, while the latter has confined
itself chiefly to an etymological analysis of mythological names in
Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and other languages, such as had been
sufficiently studied to admit of a scientific, grammatical, and
etymological treatment.

This is a long text for our remarks on Hottentot mythology; but it is
necessary to prove that there are not two schools only of mythologists:
that there are inquirers who neither follow the path of the Abbe Banier,
nor of the philologists, but a third way, unknown to, or ignored by Mr.
Muller. We certainly were quite unaware that Banier and Euhemeros were
very specially concerned, as Mr. Muller thinks, with savage mythology;
but it is by aid of savage myths that the school unknown to Mr. Muller
examines the myths of civilised peoples like the Greeks. The disciples
of Mr. Muller interpret all the absurdities of Greek myth, the gods who
are beasts on occasion, the stars who were men, the men who become
serpents or deer, the deities who are cannibals and parricides and
adulterers, as the result of the influence of Aryan speech upon Aryan
thought. Men, in Mr. Muller's opinion, had originally pure ideas about
the gods, and expressed them in language which we should call figurative.
The figures remained, when their meaning was lost; the names were then
supposed to be gods, the nomina became numina, and out of the
inextricable confusion of thought which fol