incongruous have lived on from an age in which they were natural and
inevitable, an age of savagery.

That is our general position, and it would have been a benefit to us if
Mr. Max Muller had stated it in his own luminous way, if he wished to
oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meet the
requirements of scientific method. In place of doing this once for all,
he often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defences of our
evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundred years. He
attacks the excesses of which some sweet anthropological enthusiasts have
been guilty or may be guilty, such as seeing totems wherever they find
beasts in ancient religion, myth, or art. He asks for definitions (as of
totemism), but never, I think, alludes to the authoritative definitions
by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails the theory of fetishism as if
it stood now where De Brosses left it in a purely pioneer work--or,
rather, where he understands De Brosses to have left it. One might as
well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius left it, or the theory of
evolution where it was left by the elder Darwin.

Thus Mr. Max Muller really never conies to grips with his opponents, and
his large volumes shine rather in erudition and style than in method and
system. Anyone who attempts a reply must necessarily follow Mr. Max
Muller up and down, collecting his scattered remarks on this or that
point at issue. Hence my reply, much against my will, must seem
desultory and rambling. But I have endeavoured to answer with some kind
of method and system, and I even hope that this little book may be useful
as a kind of supplement to Mr. Max Muller's, for it contains exact
references to certain works of which he takes the reader's knowledge for
granted.