Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/115

Nations. In that work, following the lines laid down by Max Müller, the author endeavoured to interpret the stories current among the Indo-European nations as expansions of metaphors which were conceived as part of the original stock of expressions belonging to the race before its separation into the tribes that ultimately peopled India, Persia, and Europe. The metaphors in question were alleged to have been used of the phenomena of day and night, sunrise and sunset, summer and winter, and to have been misunderstood in the course of ages by the decay of language and from other causes, and so to have become crystallised into phrases that formed the foundation of tales of heroic action and suffering. In the Vedas, the earliest written poems of the Aryan race, these metaphors and phrases were found in the process of change, but as yet undisguised to the extent appearing in later times and among kindreds long severed from the original home and parentage. Cox’s work was followed at no great interval by that of Professor De Gubernatis on zoological mythology. The theory which, in the hands of Max Müller and his disciple Cox was kept within moderate, if not exactly reasonable, limits fairly ran riot in the pages of the Florentine professor; and it became obvious that, with the exercise of no great amount of ingenuity, every event of history might be resolved, and every phrase of poetry might be developed, into a sun-myth. It was time, even for those who were most dazzled by the learning and ability displayed by these advocates of the philological method of interpretation, to pause and ask whether investigation in some other direction, and in a more strictly scientific manner, might not yield results of a more solid character. Dr. Tylor had already shown the way by the publication of his great work on Primitive Culture, in which he had dealt with a few savage myths in connection with the beliefs and practices of the people who told them, and had compared both these stories and these practices with those which have survived from an unknown past among the least cul-