accidental corruption of language reduced Aryan fancy to the savage
level. He explains the corruption thus: 'We find, in Sanskrit, that
Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting
near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife.
She consented, _on condition that he should never show her a drop of
water_. One day, being tired, she asked the king for water; the king
forgot his promise, brought water, and Bheki disappeared.' This myth,
Mr. Muller holds, 'began with a short saying, such as that "Bheki, the
sun, will die at the sight of water," as we should say that the sun will
set, when it approaches the water from which it rose in the morning.' But
how did the sun come to be called Bheki, 'the frog'? Mr. Muller supposes
that this name was given to the sun by some poet or fisherman. He gives
no evidence for the following statement: 'It can be shown that "frog" was
used as a name for the sun. Now at sunrise and sunset, when the sun was
squatting on the water, it was called the "frog."' At what historical
period the Sanskrit-speaking race was settled in seats where the sun rose
and set in water, we do not know, and 'chapter and verse' are needed for
the statement that 'frog' was actually a name of the sun. Mr. Muller's
argument, however, is that the sun was called 'the frog,' that people
forgot that the frog and sun were identical, and that Frog, or Bheki, was
mistaken for the name of a girl to whom was applied the old saw about
dying at sight of water. 'And so,' says Mr. Muller, 'the change from sun
to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the mere spell
of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to miraculous charms
more familiar to a later age.' As a matter of fact, magical
metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest savages than to
people in a 'later age.' Magic, as Castren observes, 'belongs to the
lowest known stages of civilisation.' Mr. Muller's theory, however, is
this--that a Sanskrit-speaking people, living where the sun rose out of
and set in some ocean, called the sun, as he touched the water, Bheki,