How the critic knows that the legend was rare at the beginning of the Christian era he does not reveal; any more than he gives his justification for calling the Asses sign rare in the face of the statement of Lactantius that the Greeks call the sign of Cancer "(the) Asses." This reference was given by me, as also the item that the sign of the Ass and Foal is Babylonian. It was thus very likely to be known in the Semitic world. Yet Dr. Conybeare obliviously informs us that "it is next to impossible" that it should be known to "the earliest Christians," when all the while he is arguing that Matthew was not the gospel of "the earliest Christians." It is in perfect keeping with this chaotic procedure that he first oracularly refers me to Hyginus, whose version of the myth of Bacchus and the asses I had actually cited and quoted; and then, discovering that I had done so, yet leaving his written exhortation unaltered, he announces that "by Mr. Robertson's own admission, Bacchus never rode on two asses at all." It is difficult to be sure whether Dr. Conybeare does or does not believe in the historicity of Bacchus, as he does in that of Jesus; but seeing that Lactantius, as cited by me, expressly declares that the two asses (= Cancer) carried Bacchus over the marsh, and that Dr. Conybeare had already recognized that such a myth existed, his absurd conclusion can be set down only to his habitual incoherence. I have dealt in detail with his futile criticism at this point by way of putting the reader on his guard against the method of bluster. Comparative mythology is a difficult and thorny field, but it has to be explored; and Dr. Conybeare, whose study of the subject seems to have begun in the year of the issue of his book, [90] does not even discern the nature of its problems. He avowedly supposes that totems are Gods; and he argues that the Jewish and Hellenistic world in the age of Augustus was at the mythopoeic stage of the Australian aborigines of to-day. Of the phenomena of iconographic myth he is evidently quite ignorant; and his dithyramb on the sun myth tells of nothing but obsolete debate on the question. And it is in this connection that he informs his antagonists, in his now celebrated academic manner, that they are "a back number."