The Project Gutenberg eBook, Modern Mythology, by Andrew Lang


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Title: Modern Mythology

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: January 3, 2005 [eBook #14576]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN MYTHOLOGY***





Transcribed from the 1897 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





MODERN MYTHOLOGY


DEDICATION


Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.




INTRODUCTION


It may well be doubted whether works of controversy serve any useful
purpose. 'On an opponent,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold said, 'one never does
make any impression,' though one may hope that controversy sometimes
illuminates a topic in the eyes of impartial readers. The pages which
follow cannot but seem wandering and desultory, for they are a reply to a
book, Mr. Max Muller's Contributions to the Science of Mythology, in
which the attack is of a skirmishing character. Throughout more than
eight hundred pages the learned author keeps up an irregular fire at the
ideas and methods of the anthropological school of mythologists. The
reply must follow the lines of attack.

Criticism cannot dictate to an author how he shall write his own book.
Yet anthropologists and folk-lorists, 'agriologists' and 'Hottentotic'
students, must regret that Mr. Max Muller did not state their general
theory, as he understands it, fully and once for all. Adversaries rarely
succeed in quite understanding each other; but had Mr. Max Muller made
such a statement, we could have cleared up anything in our position which
might seem to him obscure.

Our system is but one aspect of the theory of evolution, or is but the
application of that

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

Anonymous may refer to: Anonymus, the Latin spelling, may refer to: