Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/118

110 about their religion. They are indolent, and apt to string their answers on the leading questions of Europeans like beads on a thread. They are humorons, and love to hoax inquirers. Their language may not always be known to the questioner. But, allowing for all these drawbacks (as every anthropologist worthy of the name will, in such case, allow) there does remain a body of coincident evidence, on authority now learned and critical, now uncritical and unlearned, which cannot be set aside as "extremely untrustworthy." This authority is accepted in questions of the evolution of art, politics, handicraft; why not in questions of religion? It is usually evidence given by men who did not see its tendency or know its value. A chance word in the Veda shows us that a savage point of marriage etiquette was known to the poet. A sneer of Theophrastus, a denunciation of Ezekiel, an anecdote of Herodotus, reveals to us the practices of contemporary savages as they existed thousands of years ago among races savage or civilised. A traveller's tale of Melville or Mandeville proves to be no mere "yarn," but completes the evidence for the existence in Asia, or the Marquesas Islands, of belief and rites proved to occur in Europe or India.

Such is the nature of the evidence for savage ideas, and for their survivals in civilisation. And the amount of the evidence is best known to him who has to plod through tracts, histories, and missionary reports.

Mr. Müller takes a point as indicating that the ordinary savage may once have been less untutored than he is at present. "What we consider as primitive may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery, or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages." We have disclaimed all knowledge of what is "primitive." Man, for all we know, may have been created an ideally perfect being. We only say that, by some process or other, he certainly did pass through the savage stage, which has left plentiful marks on every civilisation. If savages are savages by virtue of "a relapse into savagery," our argument is unaffected by that. It is enough for us that savages they are, and that Aryan society and religion is full of survivals from the condition of savagery. Mr. Müller, perhaps unconsciously, suggests evidence of this truth. He says "think only of the rules that determine marriage among the lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, superstition, pride, vanity, and stupidity.