Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE STORY OF DAPHNE Mr. Max Midler's Method in Controversy As an illustration of the author's controversial methods, take his observations on my alleged attempt to account for the metamorphosis of Daphne into a laurel tree. When I read these remarks (i. p. 4) I said, ' Mr. Max Miiller vanquishes me there, ' for he gave no reference to my statement. I had forgotten all about the matter, I was not easily able to find the passage to which he alluded, and I supposed that I had said just what Mr. Max Miiller seemed to me to make me say?no more, and no less. Thus: ' Mr. Lang, as usual, has recourse to savages, most useful when they are really wanted. He quotes an illustration from the South Pacific that Tuna, the chief of the eels, fell in love with Ina and asked her to cut off his head. When his head had been cut off and buried, two cocoanut trees sprang up from the brain of Tuna. How is this, may I ask, to account for the story of Daphne ? Everybody knows that stories of the growing of plants out of the scattered members of heroes may be found from ancient Egypt to the wigwams of the Algonquins, but these stories seem hardly applicable to Daphne, whose members, as far as I know, were never either severed or scattered.' I thought, perhaps hastily, that I must havemade the story of Tuna ' account for the story of Daphne.' Mr. Max Miiller does not actually say that I did so, but I understood him in that sense, and recognised my error. But, some guardian genius warning me, I actually hunted up my own observations.1 Well. I had never said (as I conceived my critic to imply) that the story of Tuna 'accounts for the story of Daphne.' That was what I had not said. I had observed, ' As to interchange of shape between men and women and plants, our information, so far as the...