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suckled by his mother, is butter-fed, and wind-driven, sees 
through gloom, has blazing hair, a golden beard, sharp 
weapons, and burning teeth, is footless and headless, 
thousand-eyed, thousand-horned, all-devouring, roars like 
thunder, like the wind, like a lion, bellows like a bull, has a 
hundred manifestations, and is the youngest of divinities, 
because constantly produced.* These physical epithets and 
characteristics require no explanation ; but what a world of 
simile and symbolism is involved in them, leading to subse- 
quent trope and metaphor still more obscure, and thus to 
mythologico-religious mystery. So the web of mythology 
is woven, and here we behold its pristine simplicity. 
And now let me ask, With what mental feeling did these 
Yedic Indians regard the Agni which they produced day 
by day ? Did they crudely ivorsliip the mere flame in 
fetishistic imbecility ? To believe this would be to give the 
lie direct to every noble passage in the Veda, even to the very 
existence of these hymns, for no fetish worshipper would ever 
have produced a single strophe. Be fetishism ancient as well 
as modern, or modern only,t that the Yedic poets were 
infinitely superior to such grovelling concepts is as certain as 
any fact in history. Let those who are compelled by the 
necessities of theories of evolution, physical and mental, per- 
sistently endeavour to degrade archaic man. Freethought, 
truly so called, is warped by no such trammels ; and, whilst 
fully admitting that the Deity might, in the abstract, have 
worked by evolution as well as in any other way, believes that 
there is no real evidence He has done so, and that the whole 
theory is <f not proven.” And yet I would remark, in passing, 
that a man cannot fairly be made answerable for the follies of 
his extreme followers; and that I respect the caution and 
wonderful powers of observation of a Darwin, as much as I 
despise the baseless dogmas of a Haeckel. The Indian Aryan, 
then, may not have known that heat was but a mode of 
to tv lari “as the sign of good wishes,” Pd, vide Schliemami, Troy and its 
Remains , 101, et scq.; Waring, Ceramic Art in Remote Ages, plates xli.-xliv. 
It appears equally in Akkad. “ The ideograph -f-, with the determinative 
of wood, certainly appears to contain the elements of the primitive lire-stick.” 
(Mr. St. Chad Boscawen in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 
vi. 281.) The investigation into the pictorial meaning of the ordinary As- 
syrian cuneiform which, through the archaic Babylonian, still in numbers of 
instances directly or indirectly represents the object or idea signified by the 
word, is a study of the highest interest, and one which promises very im- 
portant results. 
* Of. Yavishtha-Hephaistos i.e. Juvenis. 
t Fide Prof. Max Muller’s Paper, Is Fetishism a primitive form of Religion? 
(Macmillan, June 1878.) 
