monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter,
while on _a priori_ grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the
race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of
the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion
of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen
from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the
Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even
Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable
that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.

A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better
understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang,
and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel.
Lang's clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently
describes as the philologists--and they do indeed form part of that
camp--have had the effect of bringing 'philological theories' into sad
disrepute with sciolists and 'common-sense' people. But the sun-myths
and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red
Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists. On the
other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures
are eoian or solar in origin? Can any one question that Vivasvant the
'wide gleaming' is sun or bright sky, as he is represented in the
Avesta and Rig Veda? Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly
figure, made out of this god. Or is Mr. Lang ignorant that the god
Yima became Jemshid, and that Feridun is only the god Trita? It
undoubtedly is correct to illuminate the past with other light than
that of sun or dawn, yet that these lights have shone and have been
quenched in certain personalities may be granted without doing
violence to scientific principles. All purely etymological mythology
is precarious, but one may recognize sun-myths without building a