Muller does not say
_why_ 'in ancient languages every one of these words had _necessarily_
terminations expressive of gender.' He merely quotes the hypothesis of
the Printer's Register. If he accepts that hypothesis, it destroys his
own theory--that gender-terminations caused all things to be regarded as
personal; for, ex hypothesi, it was just because they were regarded as
personal that they received names with gender-terminations. Somewhere--I
cannot find the reference--Mr. Max Muller seems to admit that
personalising thought caused gender-terminations, but these later
'reacted' on thought, an hypothesis which multiplies causes praeter
necessitatem.

Here, then, at the very threshold of the science of mythology we find Mr.
Max Muller at once maintaining that a feature of language,
gender-terminations, caused the mythopoeic state of thought, and quoting
with approval the statement that the mythopoeic state of thought caused
gender-terminations.

Mr. Max Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning
analogous to this example. His mot d'ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is
'a disease of language.' This theory implies universal human
degradation. Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his
mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual
misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced
him to the irrational and often (as we now say) obscene and revolting
absurdities of his myths. Here (as is later pointed out) the objection
arises, that all languages must have taken the disease in the same way. A
Maori myth is very like a Greek myth. If the Greek myth arose from a
disease of Greek, how did the wholly different Maori speech, and a score
of others, come to have precisely the same malady?

Mr. Max Muller alludes to a Maori parallel to the myth of Cronos. {0b}
'We can only say that there is a rusty lock in New Zealand, and a rusty
lock in Greece, and that, surely, is very small comfort.' He does not
take the point.

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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