154 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



curring there. As to the general study of customs, the work done for 

 years past by such anthropologists as Professor Bastian, of Berlin, is 

 producing substantial progress. Among recent works "I will mention 

 Dr. Karl Andree's " Ethnologische Parallelen," and Mr. J. A. Farrer's 

 " Primitive Manners." In the comparison of customs and inventions', 

 however, the main difficulty still remains to be overcome, how to de- 

 cide certainly whether they have sprung up independently alike in 

 different lands through likeness in the human mind, or whether they 

 have traveled from a common source. To show how difficult this 

 often is, I may mention the latest case I have happened to meet with. 

 The Orang Dongo, a mountain people in the Malay region, have a 

 custom of inheritance that when a man dies the relatives each take a 

 share of the property, and the deceased inherits one share for himself, 

 which is burned or buried for his ghost's use, or eaten at the funeral 

 feast. This may strike many of my hearers as quaint enough, and 

 unlikely to recur elsewhere ; but Mr. Charles Elton, who has special 

 knowledge of our ancient legal customs, has pointed out to me that it 

 was actually old Kentish law, thus laid down in law-French : " Ense- 

 ment seieut les chateus de gauylekendeys parties en treis apres le 

 exequies e les dettes rendues si il y est issue mulier en vye, issi que la 

 mort eyt la une partie, e les fitz e les filles muliers lautre partie e la 

 femme la tierce partie." — (" In like sort let the chattels of gavelkind 

 persons be divided into three after the funeral and payment of debts, 

 if there be lawful issue living, so that the deceased have one part, and 

 the lawful sons and daughters the other part, and the wife the third 

 part.") The Church had indeed taken possession, for pious uses, of 

 the dead man's share of his own property ; but there is good Scandi- 

 navian evidence that the original custom before Christian times was 

 for it to be put in his burial-mound. Thus the right of the rude 

 Malay tribe corresponds with that of ancient Europe, and the question 

 which the evidence does not yet enable us to answer, is whether the 

 custom was twice invented, or whether it spread east and west from a 

 common source, perhaps in the Aryan district of Asia. 



It remains for me to notice the present state of comparative my- 

 thology, a most interesting but also most provoking part of anthropol- 

 ogy. More than twenty years ago a famous essay, by Professor Max 

 Mulier, made widely known in England how far the myths in the 

 classical dictionary and the story-books of our own lands might find 

 their explanation in poetic nature-metaphors of sun and sky, cloud and 

 storm, such as are preserved in the ancient Aryan hymns of the Veda. 

 Of course it had been always known that the old gods and heroes were 

 in some part personifications of nature — that Helios and Okeanos, 

 though they walked and talked and begat sons and daughters, were 

 only the Sun and Sea in poetic guise. But the identifications of the 

 new school Avent further. The myth of Endymion became the simple 

 nature-story of the setting Sun meeting Selene the Moon ; and I well 



