Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/27

 TRANSACTIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY.

AUSTRALIAN GODS.

A Reply.

BY ANDREW LANG, M.A.

I first glanced at Mr. Hartland's trenchant critique of my Australian Gods (Folk-Lore, December, 1898), I "bounded on my chair," as the French say. "Can I be this guilty creature?" I asked myself, and a trusty friend in the anthropological line hastened to assure me that I was. I had deserted the camp, he said; I had taken service under the colours of Mr. Max Müller; and Mr. Hartland, reluctantly but firmly, had hewed me to pieces before the Totem in Gilgal, or at all events had "cut me up."

However, my nerves recovered their tone. I sat down to read Mr. Hartland carefully and to verify his references (as far as I could get the authorities). Then my strength, or at all events my confidence, returned unto me. If I wished to be "trenchant" (which I do not) I could urge: (1) That Mr. Hartland's argument is of the nature of an ignoratio elenchi. This means that Mr. Hartland, with infantry, cavalry, artillery, volunteers, and mounted police, storms what he takes to be my position, and captures it without a scratch, though with great expenditure of powder and shot. But the position was unheld and undefended; the fortified crest of my Australian Olympus is in quite a different