waters between a woodpecker and a toad. But the improvement and
transfiguration, so to speak, of a myth at bottom the same is due to the
superior culture, not to the peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except
so far as culture itself depends on race. How far the purer culture was
attained to by the original superiority of the Aryan over the Andaman
breed, it is not necessary for our purpose to inquire. Thus, on the
whole, we may claim for our system a certain demonstrable character,
which helps to simplify the problems of mythology, and to remove
them from the realm of fanciful guesses and conflicting etymological
conjectures into that of sober science. That these pretensions are not
unacknowledged even by mythologists trained in other schools is proved
by the remarks of Dr. Tiele.(1)

(1) Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel., "Le Mythe de Cronos," January, 1886. Dr.
Tiele is not, it must be noted, a thorough adherent of our theory. See
Modern Mythology: "The Question of Allies".

Dr. Tiele writes: "If I were obliged to choose between this method" (the
system here advocated) "and that of comparative philology, it is the
former that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation. This method
alone enables us to explain the fact, which has so often provoked
amazement, that people so refined as the Greeks,... or so rude, but
morally pure, as the Germans,... managed to attribute to their gods
all manner of cowardly, cruel and disorderly conduct. This method alone
explains the why and wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses
of gods into beasts and plants, and even stones, which scandalised
philosophers, and which the witty Ovid played on for the diversion of
his contemporaries. In short, this method teaches us to recognise in all
those strange stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long passed away,
but enduring to later times in the form of religious traditions, of all
traditions the most persistent.... Finally, this method alone enables us
to explain the origin of myths, because it endeavours to study them
in their rudest and most primitive shape, thus allowing their true
significance to be much more clearly apparent than it can be in the
myths (so often touched, retouched, augmented and humanised) which are
current among races arrived at a certain degree of culture."

The method is to this extent applauded by a most competent authority,
and it has been warmly accepted by a distinguished French school of
students, represe