Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/30

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
xxvi
INTRODUCTION.

evidence, and from different inferences, the two authors arrive at much the same conclusion in the long run.

We have complained of the inadequate evidence for Sir George Cox's system. It is, as we have seen, derived from Mr. Max Müller's analysis of the facts of language. But there is another sort of evidence which was germane to Sir George's purpose, and which he has almost absolutely neglected. That evidence is drawn from the study of the manners and customs of men, and is collected and arranged by the science of Anthropology. The materials of that science are found in the whole of human records, in history, in books of travel, in law, customs, superstition. A summary of the results so far attained by anthropology and ethnology is to be studied by English readers in Mr. Tylor's Primitive Culture and Early History of Man. These works deal with the evolution of human institutions of every kind from their earliest extant forms found among savages. We are thus enabled, by the science of students like Mr. Tylor, to understand what the ideas and institutions of savages are, and how far they survive, more or less modified, in civilisation. Now Sir George Cox's makers of primary myths were in the savage state of culture, or, as he himself puts it, "The examination of our language carries us back to a condition of thought not many degrees higher than that of tribes which we regai d as sunk in hopeless barbarism" (Myth. Ar. i. 35). But his description of the intellectual and moral condition of the primary myth-makers (Myth. Ar. i. 39-41) shows that really Sir George's mythopoeic men were in no higher degree of "culture" than Red Indians and Maoris. As this is the case, it would surely have been well to investigate what history has to say about the mental habits of savages. As the makers of primary myths were savages, it would have been scientific to ask, "How do contemporary savages, and how did the savages of history,