Introduction to the Science of Religion

Author(s): Max Muller
Publisher: Longmans Green and Compny London

Page 72

LECTURE II.
the Incas of Peru is full of interesting problems. As we advance towards the north and its red-skinned inhabitants, our information becomes more meagre still, and after what happened some years ago, no Livre des Sauvages is likely to come to our assistance again. Yet there are wild and home-grown specimens of religious faith to be studied even now among the receding and gradually perishing tribes of the Red Indians, and, in their languages as well as in their religioss, traces may possibly still be found, before it is too late, of pre-historic migrations of men from the primitive Asiatic to the American continent, either across the stepping-stones of the Aleutic bridge in the north, or lower south by drifting with favourable winds from island to island, till the hardy canoe was landed or wrecked on the American coast, never to return again to the Asiatic home from which it had started.
And when in our religious survey we finally come back again to the Asiatic continent, we find here too, although nearly the whole of its area is now occupied by one or the other of the eight book-religions, by Mosaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, by Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, and in China by the religions of Confucius and Lao-tse, that nevertheless partly below the surface, and in some places still on the surface too, more primitive forms of worship have maintained themselves. I mean the Shamanism of the Mongolian race, and the beautiful half-Homeric mythology of the Finnish and Esthonian tribes.
And now that I have displayed this world-wide panorama before your eyes, you will share, I think,
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