reported from Australia. Among these notions are "ideas of moral
judgment and retribution after death," which in Australia Mr. Tylor marks
as "imported." {23b} In my opinion the certainty that the beliefs in
America were not imported, is another strong argument for their native
character, when they are found with such striking resemblances among the
very undeveloped savages of Australia.

Savages, Mr. Hartland says in a censure of my theory, are "guiltless" of
Christian teaching. {24} If Mr. Hartland is right, Mr. Tylor is wrong;
the ideas, whatever else they are, are unimported, yet, _teste_ Mr.
Tylor, the ideas are comparable with those of the black man's white
supplanters. I would scarcely go so far. If we take, however, the best
ideas attributed to the blacks, and hold them disengaged from the
accretion of puerile fables with which they are overrun, then there are
discovered notions of high religious value, undeniably analogous to some
Christian dogmas. But the sanction of the Australian gods is as
powerfully lent to silly, or cruel, or needless ritual, as to some moral
ideas of weight and merit. In brief, as far as I am able to see, all
sorts of ideas, the lowest and the highest, are held at once confusedly
by savages, and the same confusion survives in ancient Greek belief. As
far back as we can trace him, man had a wealth of religious and mythical
conceptions to choose from, and different peoples, as they advanced in
civilisation, gave special prominence to different elements in the primal
stock of beliefs. The choice of Israel was unique: Greece retained far
more of the lower ancient ideas, but gave to them a beauty of grace and
form which is found among no other race.

If this view be admitted for the moment, and for the argument's sake, we
may ask how it applies to the myths of Apollo. Among the ideas which
even now prevail among the backward peoples still in the neolithic stage