This would seem, unless they ignore all difficulties, a better standpoint for those who think, through the application of the solar legends, "to unlock almost all the secrets of mythologies;" and any theory connected with the sun and sun-worship has this advantage, that it can be extended to everything under the sun! It is sufficiently obvious that no system can be held to have settled these questions, which, if there were myths before there was a mythology, does not appropriate these antecedent myths, or exclude counter explanations; and it is equally clear that there can have been no mythology of which the solar legends were the offspring, if the legends embody thoughts which transcend the mythology; and no mythic period if they testify to facts and ideas incompatible with its existence. Allowing for a certain confusion arising out of "polyonomy," this sort of confusion, if there were nothing else, ought not to baffle the ingenuity of experts like Mr Max Müller and Mr Cox. Such complications should be as easily disentangled as the superadded figures in Egyptian chronology (_vide_ chapter vi.) when the key has been found. But does Mr Max Müller profess to have brought the various legends into harmony? On the contrary (ii. 142), he frankly admits--"Much, no doubt, remains to be done, and _even_ with the assistance of the Veda, the whole of Greek mythology will never be deciphered and translated." I have no wish to push an admission unfairly, but this appears to me fatal as regards the argument with which I am dealing.[135] If there are myths which never will be deciphered, this must be because they have had some non-astral or non-solar origin, which I consider to be almost equivalent to saying that they must have had some pre-astral origin. What that precise origin was I think I have been able sufficiently to indicate in italicising the subjoined sentences from Mr Max Müller. If these enigmas can be shown to be strictly local and Grecian, _cadit quæstio;_ but if they are common to other mythologies, and these the oldest, I must say they have the look of antecedent existence. At any rate, like those inconvenient boulders in the sand and gravel strata, they require the intervention of some glacial period to account for them.[136]