158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Both assume to make liierography a simple province of their re- 

 spective empires. Sometimes linguists wish to interdict anthropolo- 

 gists from illustrating by comparison myths that do not belong to the 

 same group of languages ; sometimes ethnographists and students of 

 folk-lore accuse linguistics of having reduced mythology to a mirage, 

 and, under the pretext that philologists do not agree in their etymolo- 

 gies, deny that they have contributed to the knowledge of myths, even 

 within the circle of the Indo-European languages.* Let us examine 

 the force of these conflicting pretensions : 



The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is in- 

 contestably not sufficient to interpret the myths of peoples belonging 

 to other ethnic groups, or to explain all the mythology of the Aryan 

 peoples. AYhere myths occur under a form nearly identical among dif- 

 ferent races, beginning with the uncivilized people of our own epoch, 

 we have a general fact, the source of which should be sought else- 

 where than in the language or the isolated history of a particular race. 

 Every one has heard of were-wolves. An explanation of the origin of 

 lycanthropy has been sought in a supposed Greek pun, resting upon 

 the assonance of Avkos, wolf, and XevKo?, white. Tradition may have 

 spoken of personages dressed in white ; whence a popular legend that 

 they were transformed into wolves. But anthropology disposes of 

 this theory by telling us that among uncivilized peoples very distant 

 one from another, in Asia, Africa, and America, the power is attrib- 

 uted to some men of transforming themselves into wild or dangerous 

 animals, and explains that such a belief flows naturally from the idea 

 that the savage forms of the mutual relations of man and the animal 

 world, f 



It is nevertheless true that philology alone can disengage the origi- 

 nal sense of some names and some myths from the confusion of grad- 

 ual changes and parasitical surcharges. How could we have been able 

 to penetrate the myth of Prometheus, or write the real history of 

 Jupiter, without the study of Sanskrit? J Sir John Lubbock attempts 

 to exjilain the origin and attributes of Mercury, or Hermes, by the 

 usage, widely extended among non-civilized peoples, of paying worship 

 to erect stones. These stones, we observe, mark the respective limits 

 of the tribes, are set up in pastures, point out roads, designate the 

 location of markets and intertribal meeting-places, bear inscriptions, 

 and cover tombs. Hence, Mercury came to be regarded as the patron 

 of shepherds, travelers, merchants, and, sarcastically, of thieves, the 



* See, in particular, in the " Athcnreum " of August 30, 1884. 



t " To those who live m countries where wicked people and witches are supposed 

 constantly to assume the form of wild beasts,'' says Sir A. C. Lyal, writing of India, 

 '"the explanation of lycanthropy by a confusion between \vkos and Aeu/cbj appears utter- 

 ly idle." 



X Even Mr. Andrew Lang, who holds to the possibility of accounting for myths with- 

 out the aid of philology, had to have recourse to it when he came to the Indo-European 

 myths. (Sec, in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xvii, p. 153.) 



