es of gods, without the myths and the ritual
which attach elsewhere to gods, the presumption is that here too we
have to deal with survivals of a system of worship and mythology,
which once existed, and has now gone to pieces, leaving but these
pieces of wreckage behind. Thus, amongst the Australian black-fellows
we find myths about gods who now receive no worship. But they never
could have become gods unless they had been worshipped at some time;
they could not have acquired the proper, personal names by which they
are designated in these surviving myths, if they had not been
worshipped long enough for the words which designate them to become
proper names, i.e. names denoting no other person than the one
designated by them. Amongst other backward peoples of the earth we
find the names of gods surviving, not only with no worship but no
myths attached to them; and the inference plainly is that, as they are
still remembered to be gods, they once were objects of worship
certainly, and probably once were subjects of mythology. And if, of a
bygone religious system all that remains is in one place some
fragments of mythology, and in another nothing but the mere names of
the gods, then it is nothing astonishing if elsewhere all that we find
is some fragment of worship, some rite, which continues to be
practised, for its own sake, even though all memory of the gods in
whose worship it originated has disappeared from the common
consciousness--a disappearance which would be the easier if the gods
worshipped had acquired no names, or names as little personal as those
of the _di indigites_. Ritual of this kind, not associated with the
names of any gods, is found amongst the Australian tribes, and may be
the wreckage of a system gone to pieces.

Here, too, there is opportunity again, for the same error as that into
which students of mythology once fell before, when they found, or
thought they found, in mythology, profound truths, known or revealed
to sages of old. The survivals mentioned in the last paragraph may be
interpreted as survivals of a prior monotheism or a primitive
revelation. But if they are survivals, at all, then they are
survivals from a period when the ancestors of the present-day Africans
or Australian black-fellows were in an earlier stage of social
development--in an earlier stage even of linguistic development and of
the thought which develops with language--than their descendants are
now. Even in that earlier