Mr. Muller says, in his famous essay on 'Comparative Mythology' {58b}:
'How can we imagine that a few generations before that time' (the age of
Solon) 'the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were
adequately expressed by the story of Uranos maimed by Kronos,--of Kronos
eating his children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his whole
progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America, we hardly find
anything more hideous and revolting.' We have found a good deal of the
sort in Africa and America, where it seems not out of place.

One objection to Mr. Muller's theory is, that it makes the mystery no
clearer. When Greeks were so advanced in Hellenism that their own early
language had become obsolete and obscure, they invented the god [Greek],
to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it) [Greek], son of
[Greek]. But why did they tell such savage and revolting stories about
the god they had invented? Mr. Muller only says the myth 'would roll on
irresistibly.' But why did the rolling myth gather such very strange
moss? That is the problem; and, while Mr. Muller's hypothesis accounts
for the existence of a god called [Greek], it does not even attempt to
show how full-blown Greeks came to believe such hideous stories about the
god.

* * * * *

This theory, therefore, is of no practical service. The theory of
Adalbert Kuhn, one of the most famous of Sanskrit scholars, and author of
'Die Herabkunft des Feuers,' is directly opposed to the ideas of Mr.
Muller. In Cronus, Mr. Muller recognises a god who could only have come
into being among Greeks, when the Greeks had begun to forget the original
meaning of 'derivatives in -[Greek] and -[Greek].' Kuhn, on the other
hand, derives [Greek] from the same root as the Sanskrit Krana. {59}