A few words may perhaps be added to what Mr. Clodd has said about anthropology and the Vedas. Anthropologists are not really anxious (I hope) to devise reasons for evading the study of the Vedas. They are only anxious that Vedic texts should not be brought forward as proofs on the whole of what man's religious ideas were in the beginning, or near the beginning, of religion. That the Vedas contains some extremely backward notions they are ready, and even anxious, to admit. The Vedic myths of the fire-stealer, of the making of things out of the mangled Purus ha, of the stars, and of certain divine adventures tally with the myths of savages, and are probably survivals from a very rude and remote past. But the lofty, moral, and, so to speak, metaphysical speculations of the Vedas look like the speculations of an advanced civilisation. We are told that the ancestors of the Vedic Indians were practically civilised before Sanskrit was a language – before the Aryan separation. We cannot, therefore, regard elaborate hymns of such an old civilisation, hymns elaborately preserved by a careful teaching, as illustrative (save in certain survivals) of a very early condition of human thought. Prof. Max Müller says, ‘If we mean by primitive the people who have been the first of the Aryan race to leave behind literary relics of their existence on earth, then I say the Vedic poets are primitive.’ But no anthropologist dreams of applying the word ‘primitive’ to a literary, and an elaborately literary, set of poets. Indeed, the word ‘primitive’ might well be discarded from the anthropological vocabulary. The rudest savage with a language, a bow, and a fire has probably travelled farther from primitive life than we have travelled from savagery. We do not find fault (as we are said to do) because the Vedas ‘do not represent primitive men exactly as we think they ought to have been.’ We only find fault when we are told that the Vedas represent primitive men at all. They represent men in a highly interesting state of civilisation, but not exempt from survivals of savage ideas – ideas, to quote Mr. Müller, ‘as rude and crude as any palaeolithic weapon.’