Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/57

 the questions they were asked to answer. A very useful collection was made some time ago by Mr. Tylor to show the untrust worthiness of the accounts of most travellers and missionaries, when they give us their impressions of the languages, religions, and traditions of races among whom they lived for a longer or shorter time. The same people who by one missionary are said to worship either one or many gods, are declared by another to have no idea and no name of a Divine Being. But, what is stranger still, even the same person sometimes makes two equally confident assertions which flatly contradict each other." Several examples of these inconsistencies are quoted.

Any reader of this passage might naturally suppose that Mr. Tylor thought our materials for the study of savage religions, language, and traditions quite untrustworthy. If Mr. Tylor really thought thus, we might abandon any attempt to explain mythology and customs by the study of savages. But as Mr. Tylor has devoted several chapters of Primitive Culture to examining the savage origins of mythology and religion, he apparently does not think our evidence so very hopeless after all. The passage in Mr. Tylor's work to which Mr. Müller refers is (probably). Primitive Culture, i. 418, 419. Mr. Tylor there remarks, "It is not unusual for the very writer who declares in general terms the absence of religious phenomena among some savage people, himself to give evidence that shows his expressions to be misleading." But, far from dismissing the whole topic as one on which no anthropological reports can be trusted, Mr. Tylor goes on to shew that the inconsistencies of evidence have chiefly arisen from want of a definition of religion. The missionary says, "the savage has no religion," meaning nothing like what the missionary understands by religion. He then proceeds to describe practices which, in the eyes of