me some ten years ago, words to the following effect were used: The pro-ethnic Aryan's ideas of religion and morals can only be guessed, and how many gods he had, it is impossible to say. It is, however, certain that he worshipped one above all others, if others he had, and that he spoke of him in terms expressive at once of the light of day and of the wide expanse of the sky, which looked down upon him wherever he roamed. This may have been merely his way of saying that his great Heaven-father was the god of light, and that he was present everywhere.
So I was led to think then; but I should now say that those words, which are perhaps more faulty in what they imply than what they directly express, are pitched in far too high a key. For if the Aryans in question had attained to the idea of so transcendent a god as this would suggest, there would be a difficulty in understanding how, as the Dyaus of Sanskrit literature, he should have become comparatively a lay figure, that as Tiu he should have been superseded by Woden and Thor among the Teutons, and that among the Gauls his pre-eminence should at any time have been threatened by a Mercury. This would look somewhat like a reversion of the great law of evolution, a serious argument against any theory of religion or mythology. So we cannot do better than go back to find whether our too hastily formed notions of the Father Sky of the pro-ethnic Aryans will not admit of revision.
The task has been rendered comparatively easy by the labours of the student of anthropology: that science of man is not quite new, but the cunabula of the Aryan were thought too sacred to be handled by the anthropo-
