Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/401

Rh future we may see the very desirable application of institutional archæology to mythology. The gods and rituals of a nomad or pastoral people will differ from those of an agricultural type of society, and we should find traces of the difference in the passage of one nation through these stages. Prof. Smith at times makes use of this criterion, but the institutional archæology of the Semites is in too immature a state to be of much use in this direction at present.

Both books are slightly old-fashioned in assuming a unity and solidarity among both Aryans and Semites, which all recent research tends to disprove. In all branches of pre-historic and folk-lore research the tendency is to regard customs, language, and institutions as having a definite origin at a fixed place and epoch, and their spread is to be explained through diffusion by borrowing. I have already referred to this in connection with Mr. Frazer’s book, but the point is important enough to deserve reiteration. The borrowing hypothesis is clearly applicable to mythology, since the religions of the whole world have been borrowed from opposite races, the Buddhism of the Mongol races from the Aryans of India, the Christianity of Europe from the Semites of Judæa, and the Mahommedanism of Turkey, India, and Africa from Semitic Arabia. Those are borrowing facts which lend great plausibility to the borrowing hypothesis on a smaller scale and in less wide areas.

The last two books on our list deal on a large scale with this borrowing process, in language, custom, and institutions among the early Aryans. Dr. Schrader’s book gives the facts of the pre-historic antiquities of the Aryan peoples, as deduced from their languages and their material archaeology, with German thoroughness; but, alas! with German unreadableness. Though professing to review and revise the facts of philology by the facts of archæology, the book is, in the main, philological. It chiefly interests us here as giving the latest word on the original Aryan