Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/120

112 we retained the old rules, and if Mr. Thompson married Miss Jones, the children would be named Jones; and no Mr. Jones, born in Caithness, could marry a Miss Jones in no way related to him, and born, say, at the Land's End. This is the regular savage rule, and the contraction of this rule down to our own system is a perfectly well-marked process. But why, in the beginning of society, no Mr. Jones might marry a Miss Jones is a problem which can only be solved by such ingenious reconstructions of the past as Mr. M'Lennan left among his papers. These reconstructions, I trust, may one day be published. They will be open to controversy, but what is scarcely controvertible is the statement that civilized marriage laws are a gradual simplification of savage laws, and that the history of the rules of marriage proves that civilisation has passed through and been developed out of customs like those of contemporary savages.

What is true of law and customs, ought also to be true about religion and mythology. We have tried to show that there is nothing irrational in expecting early religious ideas from people in a backward rather than from people in a forward state of culture, and we have attempted to explain the character of the evidence on which we rely. The next point made by the anthropologist is to show that, whether savages be degenerate from civilisation, or not yet arrived at civilisation, remains of their ideas are, after all, to be found in the Vedas and the Vedic faith. We say to Mr. Müller, "Our savage friends are less remote from the beginning than your Vedic friends, but your Vedic friends retain a very great number of the most barbarous ideas of our savage friends." A long past of civilisation has enabled the Vedic poets to reach, on occasion, the moral level of the Hebrew Psalmist. But that long past of civilisation has not obliterated many of the ideas which are still current among savages, and which the Vedic poets have presumably inherited from ancestral savages, or (if you prefer it) have borrowed from savages contemporary with themselves.

To develop these statements would require a long article. In the meantime, it may suffice to say that the cosmological myths, the deluge myth, the myths of the stars, the wilder adventures of the gods, the myths of death, the belief in evil spirits, the myths of fire-stealing, which we find in the Veda, and still more in the Brahmanas, may all be paralleled in the mythology of Tinnehs, Nootkas, Murri, Thlinkeets, Tacullies, Papuans, Eskimo, and others of the lowest races. The main difference is that among the lowest races animals generally