general study of mankind the frontiers of
language and race ought never to disappear, yet they can no longer be
allowed to narrow or intercept our view. How much the student of Aryan
mythology and ethnology may gain for his own progress by allowing himself
a wider survey over the traditions and customs of the whole human race, is
best known to those who have studied the works of Klemm, Waitz, Bastian,
Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Tylor, and Dr. Callaway. What is prehistoric in
language among the Aryan nations, is frequently found as still historic
among Turanian races. The same applies with regard to religions, myths,
legends, and customs. Among Finns and Lapps, among Zulus and Maoris, among
Khonds and Karens, we sometimes find the most startling analogies to Aryan
traditions, and we certainly learn, again and again, this one important
lesson, that as in language, so in mythology, there is nothing which had
not originally a meaning, that every name of the gods and heroes had a
beginning, a purpose, and a history.

Jupiter was no more called Jupiter by accident, than the Polynesian
_Maui_, the Samoyede _Num_, or the Chinese _Tien_.(42) If we can discover
the original meaning of these names, we have reached the first ground of
their later growth. I do not say that, if we can explain the first purpose
of the mythological names, we have solved the whole riddle of mythology,
but I maintain that we have gained firm ground. I maintain that every true
etymology gives us an historical fact, because the first giving of a name
was an historical fact, and an historical fact of the greatest importance
for the later development of ancient ideas. Think only of this one fact,
which no one would now venture to doubt, that the supreme deity of the
Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, is called by the same name as the supreme
deity of the earliest Aryan settlers in India. Does not this one fact draw
away the curtain from the dark ages of antiquity, and open before our eyes
an horizon which we can hardly measure by years? The Greek _Zeus_ is the
same word as the Latin _Ju_ in _Jupiter_, as the German _Tiu_; and all
these were merely dialectic varieties of the Vedic _Dyaus_.(43) Now
_dyaus_ in Sanskrit is the name of the sky, if used as a feminine; if used
as a masculine, as it is still in the Veda, it is the sky as a man or as a
god--it is Zeus, the father of gods and men. You know, of course, that the
whole language of ancient India is but a sister di