In no branch of learning, perhaps, has this proneness to an attractive but fallacious simplicity wrought more havoc than in the investigation of the early history of mankind; in particular, the excesses to which it has been carried have done much to discredit the study of primitive mythology and religion. Students of these subjects have been far too ready to pounce on any theory which adequately explains some of the facts, and forthwith to stretch it so as to cover them all; and when the theory, thus unduly strained, has broken, as was to be expected, in their unskilful hands, they have pettishly thrown it aside in disgust instead of restricting it, as they should have done from the outset, to the particular class of facts to which it is really applicable. So it fared in our youth with the solar myth theory, which after being unreasonably exaggerated by its friends has long been quite as unreasonably rejected altogether by its adversaries; and in more recent times the theories of totemism, magic, and taboo, to take only a few conspicuous examples, have similarly suffered from the excessive zeal of injudicious advocates. This instability of judgment, this tendency of anthropological opinion to swing to and fro from one extreme to another with every breath of new discovery, is perhaps the principal reason why the whole study is still viewed askance by men of sober and cautious temper, who naturally look with suspicion on idols that are set up and worshipped one day only to be knocked down and trampled under foot the next. To these cool observers Max {p334} Müller and the rosy Dawn in the nineteenth century stand on the same dusty shelf with Jacob Bryant and Noah’s ark in the eighteenth, and they expect with a sarcastic smile the time when the fashionable anthropological topics of the present day will in their turn be consigned to the same peaceful limbo of forgotten absurdities. It is not for the anthropologist himself to anticipate the verdict of posterity on his labours; still it is his humble hope that the facts which he has patiently amassed will be found sufficiently numerous and solid to bear the weight of some at least of the conclusions which he rests upon them, so that these can never again be lightly tossed aside as the fantastic dreams of a mere bookish student. At the same time, if he is wise, he will be forward to acknowledge and proclaim that our hypotheses at best are but partial, not universal, solutions of the manifold problems which confront us, and that in science as in daily life it is vain to look for one key to open all locks. [Sidenote: The practice of magic explains the rise of kings in some communities, but not in all.]