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MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HOTTENTOTS,
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of a few languages, who is aware of the traps he has to avoid in exploring their history, who in fact has burnt his fingers again and again when dealing with Greek, and Latin, and Sanskrit, shrinks by a kind of instinct from materials which . crumble away as soon as critical scholarship attempts to impart to them a certain cohesion and polish. These materials are often supplied by travellers ignorant of the language, by missionaries strongly biassed in one direction or the other, or by natives who hardly understood the questions they were asked to answer. A very useful collection was made some time ago by Mr. Tylor to show the untrustworthiness of the accounts of most travellers and missionaries, when they give us their impressions of the languages, religions, and traditions of races among whom they lived for a longer on shorter time. The same people who by one missionary are said to worship either one or many gods, are declared by another to have no idea and no name of a Divine Being. But, what is stranger still, even the same person sometimes makes two equally confident assertions which flatly contradict each other. Thus Sparrman (see Hahn, p. 46) is very doubtful in one place whether the Hottentots believe in a Supreme Being, and tells us that the Khoi-khoi themselves declared that they were too stupid to understand anything, and never heard of a Supreme Being. In another place, however, the same Sparrman argues that the Khoi-khoi must believe in a supreme, but very powerful and fiendish Being, from whom they expect rain, thunder, lightning, cold, &c. Liechtenstein, again, while denying that there is any trace of religious worship among the Khosa Kafirs, admits that they believe in a Supreme Being who created the world, though, if we are to
