Daphne is said to have been originally not a girl of romance, but the
dawn (Sanskirt, dahana: ahana) pursued by the rising sun. But as the
original Aryan sense of Dahana or Ahana was lost, and as Daphne came to
mean the laurel--the wood which burns easily--the fable arose that the
tree had been a girl called Daphne.(3)

(1) See Mythology in Encyclop. Brit. and in La Mythologie (A. L.),
Paris, 1886, where Mr. Max Muller's system is criticised. See also
Custom and Myth and Modern Mythology.

(2) That a considerable number of myths, chiefly myths of place names,
arise from popular etymologies is certain: what is objected to is the
vast proportion given to this element in myths.

(3) Max Muller, Nineteenth Century, December, 1885; "Solar Myths,"
January, 1886; Myths and Mythologists (A. L). Whitney, Mannhardt,
Bergaigne, and others dispute the etymology. Or. and Ling. Studies,
1874, p. 160; Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld Kultus (Berlin, 1877), p.
xx.; Bergaigne, La Religion Vedique, iii. 293; nor does Curtius like it
much, Principles of Greek Etymology, English trans., ii. 92, 93; Modern
Mythology (A. L.), 1897.

This system chiefly rests on comparison between the Sanskrit names in
the Rig-Veda and the mythic names in Greek, German, Slavonic, and other
Aryan legends. The attempt is made to prove that, in the common speech
of the undivided Aryan race, many words for splendid or glowing natural
phenomena existed, and that natural processes were described in a
figurative style. As the various Aryan families separated, the sense of
the old words and names became dim, the nomina developed into numina,
the names into gods, the descriptions of elemental processes into myths.
As this system has already been criticised by us elsewhere with minute
attention, a reference to these reviews must suffice in this place.
Briefly, it may be stated that the various masters of the school--Kuhn,
Max Muller, Roth, Schwartz, and the rest--rarely agree where agreement
is essential, that is, in the philological foundations of their
building. They differ in very many of the etymological analyses of
mythical names. They also differ in the interpretations they put on the
names, Kuhn almost invariably seeing fire, storm, cloud, or lightning
where Mr. Max Muller sees the chaste Dawn. Thus Mannhardt, after having
been a disciple, is obliged to say that comparative Indo-Germanic
mythology has not borne the fruit expected, and that "the CERTAIN ga