nos.
Yet the belief in this process as a vera causa is essential to our
author's method.

Here Mr. Max Muller warns us that his riddle theory is not meant to
explain 'the obscurities of _all_ mythological names. This is a
stratagem that should be stopped from the very first.' It were more
graceful to have said 'a misapprehension.'

Another 'stratagem' I myself must guard against. I do not say that _no_
unintelligible strings of obsolete words may continue to live in the
popular mouth. Old hymns, ritual speeches, and charms may and do
survive, though unintelligible. They are reckoned all the more potent,
because all the more mysterious. But an unintelligible riddle or
poetical saying does not survive, so we cannot thus account for mythology
as a disease of language.



Mordvinian Mythology


Still in the very natural and laudable pursuit of facts which will
support the hypothesis of a disease of language, Mr. Max Muller turns to
Mordvinian mythology. 'We have the accounts of real scholars' about
Mordvinian prayers, charms, and proverbs (i. 235). The Mordvinians,
Ugrian tribes, have the usual departmental Nature-gods--as Chkai, god of
the sun (chi=sun). He 'lives in the sun, or is the sun' (i. 236). His
wife is the Earth or earth goddess, Vediava. They have a large family,
given to incest. The morals of the Mordvinian gods are as lax as those
of Mordvinian mortals. (Compare the myths and morals of Samos, and the
Samian Hera.) Athwart the decent god Chkai comes the evil god
Chaitan--obviously Shaitan, a Mahommedan contamination. There are plenty
of minor gods, and spirits good and bad. Dawn was a Mordvinian girl; in
Australia she was a lubra addicted to lubricity.

_How does this help philological mythology_?

Mr. Max Muller is pleased to find solar and other elemental gods among
the Mordvinians. But the discovery in no way aids his special theory.
Nobody has ever denied that gods who are the sun or live in the sun are
familiar, and are the centres of myths a

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.

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