The streams roar from the tires, when they send out their cloud-voices," etc.
Nothing would seem more justifiable, in view of this hymn and of many like it, than to assume with Mueller and other Indologians, that the Marut-gods are personifications of natural phenomena.

As clearly do Indra and the Dawn appear to be natural phenomena.

But no less an authority than Herbert Spencer has attacked this view: "Facts imply that the conception of the dawn as a person results from the giving of dawn as a birth-name."[9] And again: "If, then, Dawn [in New Zealand and elsewhere] is an actual name for a person, if where there prevails this mode of distinguishing children, it has probably often been given to those born early in the morning; the traditions concerning one of such who became noted, would, in the mind of the uncritical savage ...
lead to identification with the dawn."[10] In another passage: "The primitive god is the superior man ...

propitiated during his life and still more after his death."[11] Summing up, Spencer thus concludes: "Instead of seeing in the common character of so-called myths, that they describe combats of beings using weapons, evidence that they arose out of human transactions; mythologists assume that the order of Nature presents itself to the undeveloped mind in terms of victories and defeats."[12] Moreover (_a posteriori_), "It is not true that the primitive man looks at the powers of Nature with awe.

It is not true that he speculates about their characters and causes."[13] If Spencer had not included in his criticism the mythologists that have written on Vedic religion, there would be no occasion to take his opinion into consideration.