[Among the many obscurations of history set up by presuppositions is that which rules out all evidence for community of source in myths save that of philology, the most precarious of all proofs. The argument on this subject has been conducted even by opposing schools of philology as if all alike believed that every God, like every man, is an entity with a name, traceable by his name, and remaining substantially unchanged in his attributes through the ages. When Max Müller propounded such derivations as that of Zeus from the Sanskrit Dyaus, some scholars for whom Sanskrit was occult matter observed a respectful deference, while others debated whether the derivations were philologically sound. To mythological science, strictly speaking, it mattered little whether they were or were not. God-ideas may pass with little change from race to race through contacts of conquest, the attached God-names changing alike for "absorbed" races and for those which "absorb" them, whereas other God-names may endure with little change for ages while the attributes connected with them are being continuously modified, and the tales told under them are being perpetually added to, and many are dismissed. The Zeus of the Iliad is probably a wholly disparate conceptual figure from the Dyaus of the early "Aryan," supposing the names to be at bottom the same vocable. The philological fact is one thing, the mythological fact another. Writers like Dr. Conybeare, who have never even realized the nature of a mythological problem, bewilder their readers by blusterously affirming that there can be no homogeneity between myth-conceptions unless the names attached to them in different regions and by different races are etymologically akin. They irrationally ask for linguistic "equations" where a linguistic equation by itself would count for nothing, the relevant fact being the equation of the myth-concepts. Blind to the salient facts that every "race" concerned had undergone mutation by conquest; that God-names and God-ideas alike passed from race to race by intermarriages, [176] by the effects of enslavement, and by official adoption; [177] and that conquering races constantly adopted wholly or partly the "Gods" of the conquered, [178] they in effect assume that God-names and God-concepts are fixed entities, traceable solely by glossology. As if glossology could possibly pretend to trace, even on its own ground, all the transformations of proper-names and appellatives through different races and languages. The pretence that these are on all fours with the general development of language is mere scientific charlatanism.