Salomon Reinach has done good service to the science of comparative religion in France. After a distinguished archæological career he interested himself in the study of religious science. In 1905 he began his _Cultes, mythes, et religions_[30] and in 1909 he published a general sketch of the history of religions under the title _Orpheus_. In his preface to _Cultes, mythes, et religions_ M. Reinach makes some lively and amusing remarks concerning the ignorance in France of later developments of religious science. Speaking of new theories, he says: "As a matter of fact, I do not exactly know who made the discoveries. The names of Tylor, McLennan, Lang, Smith, Frazer, and Jevons suggest themselves; but the one thing certain is that it was not myself. Mine has been a lowlier part--to grasp the ideas of my betters, and to diffuse them as widely as I might, first in my lectures at the École du Louvre, then in the Académie des Inscriptions, and again in many popular and scientific reviews. In France, when I began my excursions into these fields, the whole subject was so absolutely a sealed book that M. Charles Richet had to ask me to explain the word _totemism_, before I dealt with that group of phenomena in the _Revue Scientifique_. At the Académie des Inscriptions in 1900 the only members who did not doubt my sanity when I read some lucubrations on the Biblical taboos and the totemism of the Celts were MM. Maspero and Hamy. The German scholars whom I saw about the same time, Mommsen among the rest, had never heard of a totem.[31] The taboos and totems of the Bible, a question underlying those alimentary interdictions which ignorance regards as hygienic precepts, brought the Jewish theologians into the lists. One of them dealt faithfully with me as an anti-Semite, an epithet already hurled at me by my distinguished friend Victor Bérard, because I had ventured to impugn, in the pages of the _Mirage Oriental,_ the antiquity and omnipresence of Phoenician commerce. To-day the voice of ignorance is a little less heard in the land. Thanks to the diffusion of the English works which have inspired me, thanks to the labours of the lamented Marillier and the editors of the _Année Sociologique_--thanks perhaps, in some degree, to my own missionary efforts, which, with the ardour of the neophyte, I have carried into the very precincts of the popular universities--those who once kicked most obstinately against the pricks now acknowledge that the system of anthropological exegesis is 'the fashion,' and that 'something may be said for' totems and taboos."