the later works of Mr. Max Müller, the echo of the old complaints.
Anything you please, Mr. Max Müller says, you may find among your useful
savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just.
You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out
what suits your case. Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory
is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being.
You can find evidence for that. Or suppose you want to show that they have
no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also. Your
testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the
people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or
other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such
foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to
mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their
most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject?

To all these perfectly natural objections Mr. Tylor has replied.[1]
Evidence must be collected, sifted, tested, as in any other branch of
inquiry. A writer, 'of course, is bound to use his best judgment as to
the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and, if possible, to obtain
several accounts to certify each point in each locality.' Mr. Tylor then
adduces 'the test of recurrence,' of undesigned coincidence in testimony,
as Millar had already argued in the last century.[2] If a mediaeval
Mahommedan in Tartary, a Jesuit in Brazil, a Wesleyan in Fiji, one may add
a police magistrate in Australia, a Presbyterian in Central Africa, a
trapper in Canada, agree in describing some analogous rite or myth in
these diverse lands and ages, we cannot set down the coincidence to chance
or fraud. 'Now, the most important facts of ethnography are vouched for in
this way.'

We may add that even when the ideas of savages are obscure, we can