54 THE ORIGIN OF ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 



lies Prof. Max Miiller apparently ascribes to the untrust- 

 worthiness of traditions, which are &quot; careless about con 

 tradictions, or ready to solve them sometimes by the most 

 atrocious expedients.&quot; (&quot; Chips,&quot; etc., vol. ii., p. 84.) But 

 if the evolution of the myth has been that above indicated, 

 there exist no anomalies to be got rid of: these diverse 

 genealogies become parts of the evidence. For we have 

 abundant proof that the same objects furnish metaphori 

 cal names of men in different tribes. There are Duck 

 tribes in Australia, in South America, in North America. 

 The eagle is still -a totem among the North Americans, as 

 Mr. McLennan shows reason to conclude that it was 

 among the Egyptians, among the Jews, and among the 

 Romans. Obviously, for reasons that have been assigned, 

 it naturally happened in the early stages of the ancient 

 races, that complimentary comparisons of their heroes to 

 the sun were frequently made. What resulted ? The 

 sun having furnished names for sundry chiefs and early 

 founders of tribes, and local traditions having severally 

 identified them with the sun, these tribes, when they grew, 

 spread, conquered, or came otherwise into partial union, 

 originated a combined mythology, which necessarily con 

 tained conflicting stories about the sun-god, as about its 

 other leading personages. If the North- American tribes, 

 among several of which there are traditions of a sun-god, 

 had developed a combined civilization, there would simi 

 larly have arisen among them a mythology which ascribed 

 to the sun several different proper names and genealogies. 



Let rne briefly set down the leading characters of this 

 hypothesis which give it probability. 



True interpretations of all the natural processes, or 

 ganic and inorganic, that have gone on in past times, 

 habitually trace them to causes still in action. It is thus 



