bridge where the souls of the just are led by their guardian angels across to paradise. The Israelite conceived it to be the bow of Jehovah in the clouds. With the Hindoo it was the god Rama; and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes, the thunderer, who with it slew the sorcerers that were in quest of men's lives. It was also imagined as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-dress of feathers, St. Bernard's crown, or the sickle of the Esthonian deity. These were all equally poetical conceptions-creations of the brain-many of them beautiful, but wholly unstable as foundations on which to erect an edifice to stand for all time or to withstand the rugged winds of fact or prosaic truth.

Our author narrates how this faculty of myth-making is also exercised by the deaf and dumb, who work out similar analogies in their wordless thought. Often and again have. they been found to suppose themselves taught by their guardians to worship and pray to sun, moon, and stars as personal beings. Others have described their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to things within their reach, in some instances fancying the moon made like a dumpling and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble across a table, and the stars cut out with great scissors and stuck up against the sky, while in other instances the moon was supposed to be a furnace and the stars fire-grates, which the beings above the firmament were believed to heat and illumine with fire in the same way as people light up grates here.

Mr. Tylor appositely remarks that “language undoubtedly has had much to do in the formation of myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings. Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus by the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed imagination, we have others in which language has led and imagination has followed in the track." He further considers myths divisible into two classes or grades; first the material myth or primary, and second the verbal myth, or more particularly metaphor.

He considers it difficult to define the exact thought lying at the root of every mythic conception, but in easy cases the course of formation can be easily followed. Several tribes of North American Indians have personified Nipinukhe and Pipunukhe, the beings who bring the spring (nipin) and the winter (pipun); Nipinukhe brings the heat and birds and verdure; Pipunukhe, on the other hand, ravages with his cold winds, his ice and snow; one comes as the other goes, and between them they divide the world. This in principle is not unlike all the nature-myths of the world.

In the springtime it is said that May has conquered old Winter-his gate is open and he has sent messages before him to tell the fruit trees that he is coming. His tent is pitched, he brings the woods their clothing. In a similar way night is personified, and it is easy to see how it comes to pass. Day is her son, and each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To minds in the mythological stage, the curse becomes a personal being, hovering in space until it finds a victim to light upon. Time and nature also arise in personality in the same manner as individual entities; and the same with fame and fortune, they become personal arbiters of the lives of men. But at length the change of meaning goes on,. and thoughts that once had a more real sense fade into mere poetic forms of speech. It is only necessary to compare the effect of ancient and modern personifications on the mind to understand something of what has happened in the interval. "Milton may be consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells how Sin and Death sat within the gates of hell, and how they built their bridge of length prodigious across the deep abyss to earth, yet such descriptions leave but scant meaning on modern minds, and we are apt to say, as we might of some counterfeit bronze from Naples; 'for a sham antique how cleverly done.' Entering into the mind of the old Norsemen, we guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest modern imitations can carry lay in his pictures of Hel, the deathgoddess, stern and grim and livid, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in her nine worlds the souls of the departed; Hunger is her dish, Famine is her knife, Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain. When such old

material descriptions are transformed to modern times, in spite of all the accuracy of reproduction, their spirit is quite changed. The story of the monk who displayed among his relics the garments of St. Faith is to us only a jest; and we call it quaint humor when Charles Lamb, falling old and infirm, once wrote to a friend, 'My bed-fellows are Cough and Cramp; we sleep three in a bed.' Perhaps we need not appreciate the drollery any the less for seeing in it at once a conse quence of a record of a past intellectual life" (p. 300-301). "In the sixth century the famed Rlie-god might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the waters of his river. Want of originality indeed seems one of the most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas, with their crowns and petticoats, still transfer themselves from the pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of old, were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in the popular mind, of course men saw him in his conventional shape. So real had St. Anthony's satyr-demon become to men's opinion, that there is a grave thirteenth century account of the mummy of such a devil being exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the present that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward foot-prints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned in the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking instance, there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of the shingles (Latin cingulun). By an imagination not difficult to understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I remember a case in Cornwall where a girl's family waited in great fear to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being that if the snake's head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as

though a snake were twined around him, and in whose mind this idea reached such reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and touch its rough scales with his hand" (p. 307).

SUN MYTHS.

As a familiar instance of sun myths Mr. Tylor quotes the nursery "song of sixpence." He says: "Obviously the four and twenty blackbirds are the four and twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the underlying earth covered with the overreaching sky; how true a touch of nature it is that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the birds begin to sing; the king is the sun, and his counting out his money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of Danae; the queen is the moon, and her transparent honey the moonlight; the maid is the rosy-fingered dawn who rises before the sun, her master, and hangs out the clouds, his clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird, who so tragically ends the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour of sunrise." This timehonored rhyme shows how easy it was for people in former times to reduce the operations of nature to poetical myths, and how the tendency with them was in the direction of treating the doings of nature to the children of small as well as larger growth in familiar mythologic imagery and language. As the sun, moon, and stars, or heaven and the earth, are the objects which must necessarily attract the observation of man in all stages of civilization more than all others in existence, it is only natural that these should largely enter into his mythic creations and become his principal gods and goddesses, and that he should be impressed with the magnitude of his indebtedness to them. "The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who in simile or in argument have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal."

"In spite of change and corruption, myths are slow to lose all consciousness of their first origin; as, for instance, classical

literature retained enough of meaning in the great Greek sunmyth to compel even Lempriere, of the Classical Dictionary, to admit that Apollo or Phoebus 'is often confounded with the sun.' For another instance, the Greeks had still present to their thoughts the meaning of Argus Panoptes, Io's hundred-eyed, all-seeing guard, who was slain by Hermes (Marcury) and changed into a peacock, for Macrobius writes as recogniz ing in him the star-eyed heaven itself; even as the Aryan Indra, the sky, is the thousand-eyed (sahasraksha shasranayana). In modern times thought is found surviving or reviving in a strange region of language. Whoever it was that brought argo as a word for heaven in the lingua farbesca, or robbers' jargon of Italy, must have been thinking of the starry sky watching him like Argus with his hundred eyes. The etymology of names, moreover, is at once the guide and safeguard of the mythologist. The obvious meaning of words did much to preserve vestiges of plain sense in classic legend, in spite of all the efforts of commentators. There was no disputing the obvious facts that Helios was the sun, and Selene the moon; and as for Jove, all the nonsense of pseudo history could not quite do away the idea that he was really heaven, for language continued to declare this in such expressions as 'Sab Jove frigido.' The explanation of the rape of Persephone, as a nature-myth of summer and winter, does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to prove its reality-Zeus, Helios, Demeterheaven and sun and mother earth. Lastly, in stories of mythic beings who are the presiding genii of star or mountain, tree or river, or heroes and heroines, actually metamorphosed into such objects, personification of nature is still plainly evident; the poet may still as of old see Atlas bear the heavens on his mighty shoulders, and Alpheus in impetuous course pursue the maiden Arethusa" (vol. i, p. 321, 322).

As a specimen of a singularly perfect and purposeful cosmic myth from New Zealand, Tylor draws the following from Sir George Gray's "Polynesian Mythology," with remarks of his own: "It seems long ago and often to have come into men's minds that the ever-reaching heaven and the all-producing earth are, as it were, a father and mother of the world,