DEDICATION
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DEDICATION
Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.
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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,

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