Note 613 — Chapter IX · THE SWORD IN KHITA-LAND, PALESTINE AND CANAAN; PHŒNICIA AND CARTHAGE; JEWRY, CYPRUS, TROY, AND ETRURIA.

See chapter viii. These assertions are fair specimens of the harm done to philology, in uncritical England, by the one-sided and ad captandum views of the ‘Sanskritists.’ Mr. Gerald Massey hardly exaggerates when he says (i. 135), ‘It looks as if the discovery of Sanskrit were doomed to be a fatal find for the philologists of our generation.’ The peculiar mixture of philology, in its specialist form, with the science of religion and the tenebræ of metaphysics has, it appears to me, done much harm to all three; but it delighted the half-educated public. It met with scant appreciation in acute France and in critical Germany, where the editing, or rather mutilation, of texts, has been severely chastised. But the Sanskritist, much to the discredit of Oriental studies and of philology in England, has given us an indigestion of Sanskritism; during the last great Oriental Congress in London he almost monopolised time and attention, to the prejudice of Orientalism in general. Apparently a protest is on the point of being raised; but, unhappily, Teutonism is still a scourge in Great Britain, and the typical Solar myth, ‘like Hermann’s a German.’