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As more and more material from other cultures became available, European scholars came to recognize even greater complexity in mythological traditions. Especially valuable was the evidence provided by ancient Indian and Iranian texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Zend-Avesta. From these sources it became apparent that the character of myths varied widely, not only by geographical region but also by historical period.
German scholar Karl Otfried M ller followed this line of inquiry in his Prolegomena to a Scientific Mythology, 1825.
He argued that the relatively simple Greek myth of Persephone reflects the concerns of a basic agricultural community, whereas the more involved and complex myths found later in Homer are the product of a more developed society.
Scholars also attempted to tie various myths of the world together in some way. From the late 18th century through the early 19th century, the comparative study of languages had led to the reconstruction of a hypothetical parent language to account for striking similarities among the various languages of Europe and the Near East. These languages, scholars concluded, belonged to an Indo-European language family. Experts on mythology likewise searched for a parent mythology that presumably stood behind the mythologies of all the European peoples.
German-born British scholar Max Müller concluded that the Rig-Veda of ancient India-the oldest preserved body of literature written in an Indo-European language-reflected the earliest stages of an Indo-European mythology. M ller attributed all later myths to misunderstandings that arose from the picturesque terms in which early peoples described natural phenomena.
For example, an expression like “maiden dawn” for “sunrise” resulted first in personification of the dawn, and then in myths about her.
Later in the 19th century the theory of evolution put forward by English naturalist Charles Darwin heavily influenced the study of mythology. Scholars researched on the history of mythology, much as they would dig fossil-bearing geological formations, for remains from the distant past.
This approach can be seen in the work of British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor. In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor organized the religious and philosophical development of humanity into separate and distinct evolutionary stages.
Similarly, British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer proposed a three-stage evolutionary scheme in The Golden Bough. According to Frazer’s scheme, human beings first attributed natural phenomena to arbitrary supernatural forces (magic), later explaining them as the will of the gods (religion), and finally subjecting them to rational investigation (science).
The research of British scholar William Robertson Smith, published in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), also influenced Frazer. Through Smith’s work, Frazer came to believe that many myths had their origin in the ritual practices of ancient agricultural peoples, for whom the annual cycles of vegetation were of central importance.
The myth and ritual theory, as this approach came to be called, was developed most fully by British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. Using insight gained from the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, Harrison argued that all myths have their origin in collective rituals of a society.
This approach reached its most extreme form in the so-called functionalism of British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who held that every myth implies a ritual, and every ritual implies a myth.
Most analyses of myths in the 18th and 19th centuries showed a tendency to reduce myths to some essential core—whether the seasonal cycles of nature, historical circumstances, or ritual. That core supposedly remained once the fanciful elements of the narratives had been stripped away. In the 20th century, investigators began to pay closer attention to the content of the narratives themselves.
Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud held that myths—like dreams—condense the material of experience and represent it in symbols.

With the extension of democratic rights in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ensuing decline of the Federalist establishment, a new conception of education began to emerge. Education was no longer a confirmation of a pre-existing status, but an instrument in the acquisition of higher status. For a new generation of upwardly mobile students, the goal of education was not to prepare them to live comfortably in the world into which they had been born, but to teach them new virtues and skills that would propel them into a different and better world. Education became training; and the student was no longer the gentleman-in-waiting, but the journeyman apprentice for upward mobility.
In the nineteenth century a college education began to be seen as a way to get ahead in the world. The founding of the land-grant colleges opened the doors of higher education to poor but aspiring boys from non-Anglo-Saxon, working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. The myth of the poor boy who worked his way through college to success drew millions of poor boys to the new campuses. And with this shift, education became more vocational: its object was the acquisition of practical skills and useful information.
For the gentleman-in-waiting, virtue consisted above all in grace and style, in doing well what was appropriate to his position; education was merely a way of acquiring polish. And vice was manifested in gracelessness, awkwardness, in behaving inappropriately, discourteously, or ostentatiously. For the apprentice, however, virtue was evidenced in success through hard work. The requisite qualities of character were not grace or style, but drive, determination, and a sharp eye for opportunity. While casual liberality and even prodigality characterized the gentleman, frugality, thrift, and self-control came to distinguish the new apprentice. And while the gentleman did not aspire to a higher station because his station was already high, the apprentice was continually becoming, striving, struggling upward. Failure for the apprentice meant standing still, not rising.