My adversary next says that my ‘savages are of the nineteenth century.’  It is of the essence of my theory that my savages are of many different centuries.  Those described by Herodotus, Strabo, Dio Cassius, Christoval de Moluna, Sahagun, Cieza de Leon, Brebeuf, Garoilasso de la Vega, Lafitau, Nicholas Damascenus, Leo Africanus, and a hundred others, are not of the nineteenth century.  This fact is essential, because the evidence of old writers, from Herodotus to Egede, corroborates the evidence of travellers, Indian Civil Servants, and missionaries of today, by what Dr. Tylor, when defending our materials, calls ’the test of recurrence.’  Professor Millar used the same argument in his Origin of Rank, in the last century.  Thus Mr. Max Muller unconsciously misrepresents me (and my savages) when he says that my ’savages are of the nineteenth century.’  The fact is the reverse.  They are of many centuries.  These two unconscious misrepresentations occur in four consecutive lines.

Anthropological Evidence

In connection with this topic (the nature of anthropological evidence), Mr. Max Muller (i. 205-207) repeats what he has often said before.  Thus he cites Dr. Codrington’s remarks, most valuable remarks, on the difficulty of reporting correctly about the ideas and ways of savages.  I had cited the same judicious writer to the same effect, {95} and had compiled a number of instances in which the errors of travellers were exposed, and their habitual fallacies were detected.  Fifteen closely printed pages were devoted by me to a criterion of evidence, and a reply to Mr. Max Muller’s oft-repeated objections.

’When [I said] we find Dr. Codrington taking the same precautions in Melanesia as Mr. Sproat took among the Ahts, and when his account of Melanesian myths reads like a close copy of Mr. Sproat’s account of Aht legends, and when both are corroborated [as to the existence of analogous savage myths] by the collections of Bleek, and Hahn, and Gill, and Castren, and Rink, in far different corners of the world; while the modern testimony of these scholarly men is in harmony with that of the old Jesuit missionaries, and of untaught adventurers who have lived for many years with savages, surely it will be admitted that the difficulty of ascertaining savage opinion has been, to a great extent, overcome.’

I also cited at length Dr. Tylor’s masterly argument to the same effect, an argument offered by him to ‘a great historian,’ apparently.

Mr. Max Muller’s Method of Controversy