It is this which lends the fascination to students of comparative mythology and to the folk-lorist. What seems arrant nonsense and the height of absurdity to ordinary intelligence, lures them on to seek in these wild stories for the origins of belief, for the early conceptions which influenced men in their religion and in their life. Removed from primitive man by centuries of progress, and ruled as we are by a scientific view of the world, it is hard for us to put ourselves at the centre of vision and standpoint of our early ancestors, to whom the facts of life were more confused than they appear to us, and in a manner more uncanny and mysterious. Like the savage of to-day, judging from their myths, they conceived all things as animated and personal, capable of endless interchange of form. Men might become beasts, beasts might change into men. Even the gods appeared in human or bestial forms. Animals, plants, stones, earth, winds and waters, spoke and acted like human beings, changing their shapes accordingly. This is the very essence of myth and fairy tale. Or as Professor Max Müller has expressed it, “What makes mythology mythological in the true sense of the word is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.” What appears most incredible and repugnant, the ugly blots and scars of these narratives are just the problems to men of science. How to account for them? How to explain their origin? Over this, contending schools are constantly engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare. Leaving the archæologists to pursue their own studies among the material “survivals,” the philologists and anthropologists take opposite sides each in defence of his own particular theory. Briefly stated, the difference between them is this: the philologists maintain that language—language as it were in a state of disease—is the great source of the mythology of the world. Professor Max Müller held this view and gave it a widely accepted vogue. The ugly scars he explained as due to the old words and popular sayings lingering on in a language after their original harmless and symbolic meanings had been lost. Thus what might have been originally a poetical remark about nature, might in process of time be interpreted colloquially and become an obscene, brutal, or vulgar myth. To go no further afield than the Hebrew sacred writings, when we think of an impassioned apostrophe to the sun, and the subsequent popular legend that the sun and the moon stood still, we see that the philologist argument is not without force and cogency.