Page:Native Religions of Mexico and Peru.djvu/29

Rh enormously from race to race and from nation to nation, yet, wherever human beings are found, develops itself under the same laws, the same principles and the same methods of deduction; that, in a word, given human nature anywhere, its religious development is reared on the same identical bases and passes through the same phases?

Mr. Max Müller, one of my most honoured masters, and one of those who have best deserved the gratitude of the learned world, has declared, with equal justice and penetration, in his Preface to Mr. Wyatt Gill's "Myths and Songs," that the possibility of studying the Polynesian mythology is to the historian what an opportunity of spending a time in the midst of the plesiosauri and the megatherions would be to the zoologist, or of walking in the shade of the vast arborescent ferns that lie buried under our present soil to the botanist. Polynesian mythology has in fact preserved, down to our own day, the pre-historic ages. And, similarly, the religions of Mexico and Peru (for the empire of the Incas held the same surprises and the same lessons in store for its explorers as that of