sky, as he is represented in the
Avesta and Rig Veda? Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly
figure, made out of this god. Or is Mr. Lang ignorant that the god
Yima became Jemshid, and that Feridun is only the god Trita? It
undoubtedly is correct to illuminate the past with other light than
that of sun or dawn, yet that these lights have shone and have been
quenched in certain personalities may be granted without doing
violence to scientific principles. All purely etymological mythology
is precarious, but one may recognize sun-myths without building a
system on the basis of a Dawn-Helen, and without referring Ilium to
the Vedic _bila_. Again, myths about gods, heroes, and fairies are to
be segregated. Even in India, which teems with it, there is little, if
any, folklore that can be traced to solar or dawn-born myths. Mr. Lang
represents a healthy reaction against too much sun-myth, but we think
that there are sun-myths still, and that despite his protests all
religion is not grown from one seed.

There remains the consideration of the second part of the double
problem which was formulated above--the method of interpretation. The
native method is to believe the scholiasts' explanations, which often
are fanciful and, in all important points, totally unreliable; since
the Hindu commentators lived so long after the period of the
literature they expound that the tradition they follow is useful only
in petty details. From a modern point of view the question of
interpretation depends mainly on whether one regard the Rig Veda as
but an Indic growth, the product of the Hindu mind alone, or as a work
that still retains from an older age ideas which, having once been
common to Hindu and Iranian, should be compared with those in the
Persian Avesta and be illustrated by them. Again, if this latter
hypothesis be correct, how is one to interpret an apparent likeness,
here and there, between Indic and foreign notions,--is it possible
that the hymns were composed, in part, before the advent of the
authors into India, and is it for this reason that in the Rig Veda are
contained certain names, ideas, and legends, which do not seem to be
native to India? On the other hand, if one adopt the theory that the
Rig Veda is wholly a native work, in how far is he to suppose that it
is separable from Brahmanic formalism? Were the hymns made
independently of any ritual, as their own excuse for being, or were
they composed expressly for the sa