In illustration of the mode and manner of tradition, is the anecdote of Mr Hookham Frere, who states, that when the Maltese talk without reserve upon religious subjects, they say, "Everybody knows that Adam was the first man, but we alone know that he possessed fishing-boats;" which Bunsen says "Can be nothing but a Phoenician reminiscence."--"Egypt," iv. 215, the reminiscence of the legend of the Fisherman. Compare the Fisherman and his wife in Grimm's "Popular Stories from Oral Tradition." In the first place, as to its variability, it is true that tested by the experience which we possess of the persistency and exactness of family and local traditions, tradition in the broader sense which I have indicated may appear to be of little value. I have elsewhere attended a closer argument on this point in reply to Sir John Lubbock (ch. xii.), but I may also make what appears to me, as regards this matter, a sufficiently important distinction. Family tradition is so confused, because at each remove in each generation, it is necessarily crossed through marriage with the traditions of another family. These may be either rival or irreconcileable. But this remark will apply with much less force, it will only secondarily and accidentally apply at all to the common traditions, the inheritance of all families starting from a common origin. If these traditions acquired some dross through the intermarriage of families, they will, on the other hand, through the very action of intermarriages, have been more frequently compared, more vividly, therefore, kept in remembrance, and more recognisable in their distortion, because the distortion is more likely to have been in the way of super-addition of what was thought congruous and supplemental. And this seems to me to meet Mr Max Müller's objection in the _Contemporary Review_ for April 1870. "Comparative philology," he says, "has taught again and again, that when we find _exactly_ the same name in Greek and Sanscrit, we may be certain that it cannot be the same word;" for we here see reason why and how these traditions have been specially protected against the natural action and law which it is the peculiar province of philology to trace.