Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/140

 The habits of savages without a history are not in themselves evidence which can in any way be depended upon. To take for granted that what the savages now are, perhaps after millenniums of degradation, all other people must have been, and that modes of thought through which they are now passing have been passed through by others, is a most unscientific assumption, and you will seldom meet with it in any essay or book without also finding proof that the writer did not know how to deal with historical evidence. Authorities are sure to be quoted which the historian knows to be worthless, and evidence in itself irreproachable will be completely misunderstood. The universality of a belief or practice, even among savages, would of course, if proved, be a very weighty fact, tending to prove that the belief or practice in question had its origin either in reason or in tradition. It is, however, impossible to exaggerate the value of Sir Henry Maine's protest against "the very slippery testimony concerning savages which is gathered from travellers' tales." "Much," he says, "which I have personally heard in India bears out the caution which I gave as to the reserve with which all speculations on the antiquity of human usage should be received. Practices represented as of immemorial antiquity and universally characteristic of the infancy of mankind, have been described to me as having been for the first time