n Controversy

As an illustration of the author's controversial methods, take his
observations on my alleged attempt to account for the metamorphosis of
Daphne into a laurel tree. When I read these remarks (i. p. 4) I said,
'Mr. Max Muller vanquishes me _there_,' for he gave no reference to my
statement. I had forgotten all about the matter, I was not easily able
to find the passage to which he alluded, and I supposed that I had said
just what Mr. Max Muller seemed to me to make me say--no more, and no
less. Thus:

'Mr. Lang, as usual, has recourse to savages, most useful when they
are really wanted. He quotes an illustration from the South Pacific
that Tuna, the chief of the eels, fell in love with Ina and asked her
to cut off his head. When his head had been cut off and buried, two
cocoanut trees sprang up from the brain of Tuna. How is this, may I
ask, to account for the story of Daphne? Everybody knows that
"stories of the growing of plants out of the scattered members of
heroes may be found from ancient Egypt to the wigwams of the
Algonquins," but these stories seem hardly applicable to Daphne, whose
members, as far as I know, were never either severed or scattered.'

I thought, perhaps hastily, that I must have made the story of Tuna
'account for the story of Daphne.' Mr. Max Muller does not actually say
that I did so, but I understood him in that sense, and recognised my
error. But, some guardian genius warning me, I actually hunted up my own
observations. {10a} Well, I had never said (as I conceived my critic to
imply) that the story of Tuna 'accounts for the story of Daphne.' That
was what I had not said. I had observed, 'As to interchange of shape
between men and women and _plants_, our information, so far as the lower
races are concerned, is less copious'--than in the case of stones. I
then spoke of plant totems of one kin with human beings, of plant-souls,
{10b} of Indian and Egyptian plants animated by _human_ souls, of a tree
which became a young man and made love to a Yurucari girl, of
metamorphosis into vegetables in Samoa, {10c} of an Ottawa myth in which
a man became a plant of maize, and then of the story of Tuna. {10d} Next
I mentioned plants said to have sprung from dismembered gods and heroes.
_All_ this, I said, _all_ of it, proves that savages mythically regard
human life as on a level with vegetable no less than with animal life.
'Turning to the my