ard? It was 'the fact that, while in the earliest accessible
documents of religious thought we look in vain for any very clear traces
of fetichism, they become more and more frequent everywhere in the later
stages of religious development, and are certainly more visible in the
later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning with the Atharvana,
than in the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda.' Now, by the earliest
accessible documents of religious thought, Professor Max Muller means the
hymns of the Rig Veda. These hymns are composed in the most elaborate
metre, by sages of old repute, who, I presume, occupied a position not
unlike that of the singers and seers of Israel. They lived in an age of
tolerably advanced cultivation. They had wide geographical knowledge.
They had settled government. They dwelt in States. They had wealth of
gold, of grain, and of domesticated animals. Among the metals, they were
acquainted with that which, in most countries, has been the latest
worked--they used iron poles in their chariots. How then can the hymns
of the most enlightened singers of a race thus far developed be called
'the earliest religious documents'? Oldest they may be, the oldest that
are accessible, but that is a very different thing. How can we possibly
argue that what is absent in these hymns, is absent because it had not
yet come into existence? Is it not the very office of pii vates et Phoebo
digna locuti to purify religion, to cover up decently its rude shapes, as
the unhewn stone was concealed in the fane of Apollo of Delos? If the
race whose noblest and oldest extant hymns were pure, exhibits traces of
fetichism in its later documents, may not that as easily result from a
recrudescence as from a corruption? Professor Max Muller has still,
moreover, to explain how the process of corruption which introduced the
same fetichistic practices among Samoyeds, Brazilians, Kaffirs, and the
people of the Atharvana Veda came to be everywhere identical in its
results.

Here an argument often urged against the anthropological method may be
shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do you
know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that their
whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and decadent from an
earlier standard?' Mr. Muller glances at this argument, which, however,
cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Muller has recognised that savage, or
'nomadic,' languages repres