Another famous, and almost comic, example of the difficulty of Vedic interpretation is well known. In Rig-Veda, x. 16, 4, there is a funeral hymn. Agni, the fire-god, is supplicated either to roast a goat or to warm the soul of the dead and convey it to paradise. Whether the soul is to be thus comforted or the goat is to be grilled, is a question that has mightily puzzled Vedic doctors.(1) Professor Muller and M. Langlois are all for "the immortal soul", the goat has advocates, or had advocates, in Aufrecht, Ludwig and Roth. More important difficulties of interpretation are illustrated by the attitude of M. Bergaigne in La Religion Vedique, and his controversy with the great German lexicographers. The study of mythology at one time made the Vedas its starting-point. But perhaps it would be wise to begin from something more intelligible, something less perplexed by difficulties of language and diversities of interpretation. (1) Muir, v. 217. In attempting to criticise the various Aryan myths, we shall be guided, on the whole, by the character of the myths themselves. Pure and elevated conceptions we shall be inclined to assign to a pure and elevated condition of thought (though such conceptions do, recognisably, occur in the lowest known religious strata), and we shall make no difficulty about believing that Rishis and singers capable of noble conceptions existed in an age very remote in time, in a society which had many of the features of a lofty and simple civilisation. But we shall not, therefore, assume that the hymns of these Rishis are in any sense "primitive," or throw much light on the infancy of the human mind, or on the "origin" of religious and heroic myths. Impure, childish and barbaric conceptions, on the other hand, we shall be inclined to attribute to an impure, childish, and barbaric condition of thought; and we shall again make no difficulty about believing that ideas originally conceived when that stage of thought was general have been retained and handed down to a far later period. This view of the possible, or rather probable, antiquity of many of the myths preserved in the Brahmanas is strengthened, if it needed strengthening, by the opinion of Dr. Weber.(1) "We must indeed assume generally with regard to many of those legends (in the Brahmanas of the Rig-Veda) that they had already gained a rounded independent shape in tradition before they were incorporated into the Brahmanas; and of this we have frequent evidence in the DISTINCTLY ARCHAIC CHARACTER OF THEIR LANGUAGE, compared with that of the rest of the text." (1) History of Indian Literature, English trans., p. 47.