in myths certain pantheistic
symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the
gods were dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought their
curiosity to the problem of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it
a depraved version of the Jewish sacred writings, and found the ark on
every mountain-top of Greece. The critical nineteenth century brought
in, with Otfried Muller and Lobeck, a closer analysis; and finally, in
the sudden rise of comparative philology, it chanced that philologists
annexed the domain of myths. Each of these systems had its own amount of
truth, but each certainly failed to unravel the whole web of tradition
and of foolish faith.

Meantime a new science has come into existence, the science which
studies man in the sum of all his works and thoughts, as evolved
through the whole process of his development. This science, Comparative
Anthropology, examines the development of law out of custom; the
development of weapons from the stick or stone to the latest repeating
rifle; the development of society from the horde to the nation. It is a
study which does not despise the most backward nor degraded tribe, nor
neglect the most civilised, and it frequently finds in Australians
or Nootkas the germ of ideas and institutions which Greeks or Romans
brought to perfection, or retained, little altered from their early
rudeness, in the midst of civilisation.

It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on
mythology. Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method--the
study of the evolution of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and
thence to the civilised stage--in the province of myth, ritual, and
religion. It has been shown that the light of this method had dawned on
Eusebius in his polemic with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head
of Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other scheme in his mind
in his erudite work on Hebrew Ritual.(1) Spencer was a student of man's
religions generally, and he came to the conclusion that Hebrew ritual
was but an expurgated, and, so to speak, divinely "licensed" adaptation
of heathen customs at large. We do but follow his guidance on less
perilous ground when we seek for the original forms of classical rite
and myth in the parallel usages and legends of the most backward races.

(1) De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, Tubingae, 1782.

Fontenelle in the last century, stated, with all the clearness of the
F