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quite unintelligible. When a wild tribe of Indians does the 
same thing, as a trial of courage, with real rattlesnakes, we 
understand the red man’s motives, and may conjecture that 
similar motives once existed among the ancestors of the Greeks. — 
Our method, then, is to compare the seemingly meaningless 
customs or manners of civilized races with the similar customs 
and manners which exist among the uncivilized and still retain 
their meaning. It is not necessary for comparison of this sort 
that the uncivilized and the civilized race should be of the same ~ 
stock, nor need we prove that they were ever in contact with 
each other. Similar conditions of mind produce similar practices, 
apart from identity of race or borrowing of ideas and manners.” 
The examination of savage customs, or their survivals in the 
shape of quaint practices whose original meaning has long been 
forgotten, is therefore a distinct branch of present-day science. 
We expect a botanist, geologist, or zoologist, when travelling into 
remote countries, to register the customs he finds observed, and 
to give a full account of them when he publishes the results of 
his labours in his own special pursuit. The subject has also not 
been without a certain indirect influence upon literature, 
especially upon the study of obscurities in the great Greek 
classics ; also it has a not unimportant place in the history of 
language, with which indeed it has by one branch of students been 
mostintimately involved. This school of thought is advocated by 
Professor Max Miiller ; its method consists in finding a word 
something like the name of the object or person named in some 
folk-story, and explaining the story, or the custom which may be 
in question, as arising through a confusion of words in the 
popular intellect of a remote age. Here is an example which will 
make the method clear. We find in Greek mythology that the 
laurel (in Greek, Daphne), was sacred to Apollo ; and a story was 
told of how Apollo had been enamoured of a girl named Daphne 
who fled from him, but was overtaken, and on calling for divine 
help was suddenly changed into a laurel. This story is 
expounded by Max Miiller as follows. Phcebus Apollo, as the 
sun, follows the dawn, which in Sanscrit is called Dahana, or 
Ahana. The yet older Aryan word must have been nearly the same, 
and when a similar name was given to the laurel, a confusion 
arose between the dawn and the laurel, and in time it was 
supposed that it was the laurel which the sun-god pursued, and 
thence it was an easy transition to the idea that Daphne had been 
a girl before she became the tree sacred to Apollo. This 
philological method is really more than 2,000 years old, and was 
