CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.

 

 

We have looked at man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those “aeriform, mystic” legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the “metallurgy and other manufacturing skill”, comes language. With us, to whom thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this is not the case. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all, but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which in all the languages we are likely to become acquainted with, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spear­head was a possibility, thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the idea, and early as we ourselves learn this art, a little thought about what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have gone before.

To begin with, then, let us try and consider what language really is. The first thing which it is very important we should realize is that writing has nothing: to do with the formation of language; for writing is a comparatively late invention, and came long after languages had gone through the chief stages of their growth, and was never meant for any other purpose than to convey to the eye the idea of sound. Language itself belongs to sound only, and appeals to no other sense than the sense of hearing. This everybody will agree to at once, for it is no more than saying that people who cannot read or write have still a language; and, of course, three or four centuries ago there were comparatively few individuals among all the inhabitants of Europe who could write; even now there are hundreds of languages in the world which have never been committed to writing. The observation would indeed be scarce worth the making, but for the necessity of a precaution against thinking at all of the look of words and not of their sound. And now, say we take any word and ask ourselves what exact relationship it holds with the thought for which it stands. “Book”—no sooner have we pronounced the word than an idea more or less distinct comes into our mind. The thought and the sound seem inseparable, and we cannot remember the time when they were not so. Yet the connection between the thought and the sound is not necessary. In fact, a sound which generally comes connected with one idea may—if we are engaged at the time upon a language not our own—enter our minds, bringing with it an idea quite unconnected with the first. Share and chère, feel and viel, are examples in point; and the same thing is shown by the numerous sounds in our language which have two or more quite distinct meanings, as for example—ware and were, and (with most people) where too; and rite and right, and wright are pronounced precisely alike; therefore there can be no reason why one sound should convey one idea more than another. In other words, the idea and the sound have an arbitrary, not a natural connection. We have been taught to make the sound “book” for the idea book, but had we been brought up by French parents the sound “livre” would have seemed the natural one to make. So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those other faculties of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down on impalpable vehicles of sound through the ages. Never, perhaps, since the time of our first parents has one person from among the countless millions who have been born had to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible as it is to imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the question—What should we do if we were ever left in such a predicament? Should we have any guide in fitting the sound on to the idea? Share and chère, feel and viel—among these unconnected notions is there any reason why we should wed our speech to one rather than another? Clearly there is no reason. Yet in the case which we imagined of a number of rational beings who had to invent a language for the first time, if they are ever to come to an understanding at all there must be some common impulse which makes more than one choose the same sound for a particular idea. How, for instance, we may ask, was it with our first parents? They have passed on to all their descendants for ever the idea of conveying thought by sound, and all the great changes which have since come into the languages of the world have been gradual and, so to say, natural. But this first invention of the idea of speech is of quite another character.

Here we are brought to the threshold of that impenetrable mystery, “the beginning of things”, and here we must pause. We recognize this faculty of speech as a thing mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that supernatural being, man. There must have been and must be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo the thought of the heart; and originally this echo must have been spontaneous and natural, the same for all alike. Now it is a mere matter of tradition and instruction, the sound we use for the idea; but at first the two must have had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of our first parents have known or guessed what the other wished to say? Just as every metal has its peculiar ring, it is as though each impression on the mind rang out its peculiar word from the tongue. Or was it like the faint tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played near? The outward object or the inward thought called out a sort of mimicry, a distant echo—not like, hut yet born of the other—on the lips. These earliest sounds may perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound flo or flu, which in an immense number of languages stands connected with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we not recognize some attempt to catch the smooth yet rushing sound of water? And again, in the sound gra or gri, which is largely associated with the notion of grinding, cutting, or scraping, there is surely something of this in the guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue grate, as it were, against the roof of the mouth. And if we see reason to think that these primitive sounds are not always the closest possible imitations of the things they should express, we need not be surprised, since we notice the same fact with regard to our other ways of conveying ideas. In expressive actions, we only half imitate the motion we intend should be followed. We say “go”, and dart out our hand, half to show that the person is to go in the direction we point out, or that he is to keep away from us; and half, again, with the object of expressing to him rapid motion by the quickness of our own movement. So with the first words. The names of animals, for instance, did not attempt to mimic the sound which the animal makes—as children call a dog a “bow-wow”, and a lamb a “baa”—but they were, as we have said, something like echoes upon the tongue of the combined effects the animal produced to sight and hearing.

We may suppose the first created man to have immediately, by this quick, spontaneous faculty of his, found words for every object which met his eye and reached his ear, as Adam is described naming each one of the animals among whom he lived; but even when furnished with a long vocabulary to represent things and belongings of things (which we call attributes or adjectives) and motions of every sort, he would still want a number of other words which could not by any possibility spring directly from the picture formed in his mind. All languages are full of words which by themselves do not and cannot awaken definite thoughts in us. All adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, particles, belong to this class. To, as, but, when, do not as mere words and taken by themselves convey any meaning; but adjectives, verbs, and substantives, hard, beat, hand, do convey an idea when taken quite alone. So that after the first man had got his list of sounds which were real echoes of his thought, he had to get another series of sounds which were echoes of nothing by themselves, but were useful for joining the others together, showing the connection in which they stood one to another.

This, then, was the second stage of language, the making of what we may call the meaningless words, for they are meaningless when taken quite alone. This second stage was probably a much slower one than the first. The making of meaning sounds might have gone on with any degree of rapidity, provided man started with the word-making faculty, within. But there seems reason to believe that every meaningless word has arisen out of some word which once belonged to the real “echo” class; that to, for instance, with, by, and, have descended from older roots (now lost), which if placed alone would once have conveyed as much idea to the mind as pen, ink, paper, do to us. It is impossible to show what all our meaningless words have come from; and we have not even the intention of bringing forward all the reasons on which this opinion is grounded—it would be too wearisome. But we may notice one or two instances of how even at the present day this process of changing meaning into meaningless words is still going on. Take first the word even, which we used a moment ago. “Even at the present day”. Here even is an adverb, quite meaningless when used alone, at least as an adverb; but if we see it alone it becomes another word, an adjective, a meaning word, bringing before us the idea of two things hanging level. “Even if” is nonsense as an idea with nothing to follow it, but “even weights” is a perfectly clear and definite notion, and each of the separate words even and weights give us clear and definite notions too. It is the same with just, which is both adverb and adjective. “Just as” brings no thought into the mind, but “just man” and just and man separately or together, do. While or whilst are meaningless; but ‘a while’, or ‘to while’—to loiter—are full of meaning. In each case the meaningless word came from the meaning word, and was first used as a sort of metaphor, and then the metaphorical part was lost sight of. The English not is meaningless, and just as much so are the French pas and point in the sense of not; but in the sense of footstep, or point, they have meaning enough. Originally il ne veut pas meant, metaphorically, “he does not wish a step of your wishes”, “he does not go a footstep with you in your wish”; il ne veut point, “he does not go a point with you in your wish”. Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that il ne veut point is rather stronger than il ne veut pas, but it never occurs to them to wonder why.

There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word yes is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word is or “it is”, though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible—as compared, for instance, with such verbs as move, beat—nevertheless belongs to the meaning class. Now it happens that the Latin language used the word est “it is” where we should now use the word “yes”; and it still further happens that our yes is probably the same as the German es, and was used in the same sense of it is as well. Instead of the meaningless word “yes” the Romans used the word est “it is”, and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying “it”. Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say est “it is” for yes, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either ille, “he”, or hoc, “this”. When, therefore, a Gaul wanted to say ‘yes’, he nodded, and said he or else this, meaning “he is so”, or “this is so”. As it happens the Gauls of the north said ille, and those of the south said hoc, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, oui and oc. And, as is well known, the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word oc instead of oui for “yes”, so that their “dialect” got to be called the langue d’oc, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. But long before that time, we may be sure, both the people of the langue d’oui  and those of the langue d’oc had forgotten that their words for “yes” once meant “he” and “this”.

We can from these instances pretty well guess the way in which the second vocabulary of meaningless words was formed. Man must have begun speaking always in a metaphorical way. Instead of saying “on the rock”, or “under the rock”, he perhaps said “head of rock” and “foot of rock”, and the words he used for head and foot may have got corrupted and changed; so that the older form might remain for the meaningless words on, under, and a newer form come to be used for head and foot. Just as the Frenchman never knows that his oui and il are both sprung from the same Latin ille. Nor, again, does the ordinary German recognize in his gewiss, “certainly”,' the same word as his past participle gewissen, ‘known’; nor the ordinary Englishman reflect that the adverb “ago” is derived from “agone”, an old past participle of the verb “to go”.

 

When people first began using sounds to express ideas, it would seem that a single sound was used to express each separate idea. Or, putting it differently, we may say that the earliest words were words of one syllable only. As man must have been in want of an enormous number of these simple sounds, he soon began ringing as many changes as possible upon each, so that with every sound went a whole family of others which were very like it, and meant to stand for ideas similar to the idea expressed by the first sound. Now the most important part of every sound, as far as the meaning goes, are the consonants which compose it, and even at the present day, if we keep the consonants of any word the same, and alter the vowel or diphthong, we get a fresh meaning closely connected with the first (fly, flee, swing, swung, &c.). It was in this way that a great many words arose connected into a class by the consonants remaining unaltered and connected together also by the thread of a common idea. As in “swing”, “swung”, “swang”, we have three different ideas expressing different tenses or times in which the action of swinging took place, and at the same time we have the central idea of swinging connected with the consonants sw-ng: just so, if in some primitive language the consonants f-l expressed the central idea of flowing, “flo” might have stood for the verb “to flow”, “flu” for the substantive, river, and “fla” for some adjective or attribute common to flowing water, bright perhaps, or soft.

Even with quite modern and cultivated languages—which are not, of course, the best for studying the early history of human speech—we may trace the way in which the consonants remain the same, or slightly changed, while the vowels alter, as when we recognize the German knecht in our knight, raum in our room; or, again, the Italian padre in the French père, tavola in table, &c. Such comparisons as these show us that English and German, French and Italian, are closely connected. But where the connection between languages is very distant, and the farther we have to go back, the more have we to divide our words into their composing syllables so that we are going backwards towards the root-sounds of language, and these as we have said, are single syllables, of which the most constant parts are the consonants. Here our knowledge stops. Of all the changes which were rung upon any particular arrangement of letters, “f-l” say, we cannot possibly determine which was the first, “flo”, “flu”, “fla”, or any other. What we actually find in any language, the most primitive even, is the existence of these root consonant-sounds expressing some general idea, the idea of flowing, or whatever it may be. Probably, as we have said, this ringing the changes upon a particular sound may have gone on with any degree of rapidity, have been almost simultaneous with the power of speaking itself, which power was, we know, simultaneous with the creation of man. So that we may practically speak of man as starting with these root sounds, which would express not a particular, but a general idea. Sometimes it is not at all easy to trace the connection between the different words which have been formed from one of these general roots. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as mâ, “to measure”, we get words in Greek and Latin which mean “to think”, and from the same root comes our “man”, the person who measures, who compares, i.e., who thinks, also our moon, which means “the measurer”, because the moon helps to measure out the time, the months. So, too, our crab is from the word creep, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say.

Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had enough material to begin all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grand­mothers pronounced “Rome”, room, and “brooch”, as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it—“broach”. And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no spelling to fix a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighboring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man out of Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of a number of “meaningless” words. “Head of rock” and “foot of rock” would sink to equivalents of “over” and “under”, when of two names for head and foot one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. What had originally meant, metaphorically, head of rock and foot of rock might come to be used for over and under the rock when new words had arisen for head and foot, in exactly the same way that the word ago has become a “meaningless” word to the Englishman of today.

The next step was the joining of words together. In one way this process may have begun very early. Two “meaning” words, as soon as formed, might be joined together to form a third idea; just as we have “anthill”, which is a different thing from either “ant” or “hill”. But there are other ways of joining words more important in the history of language than this. There is the joining on of the “meaningless” words. Although we always put the meaningless qualifying word before the chief word, and say “on the rock”, or “under the rock”, it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say “rock on”, “rock under”, the idea rock being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them on to the substantive, “rock”, “rock-by”, “rock-in”, “rock-to”, &c. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us from love, the idea of loving, “love-I”, “love-thou”, “love-he”, &c, and for the imperfect “love-was-I”, “love-was-thou”, “love-was-he”, “love-was-we”, “love-was-ye”, “love-was-they”, for perfect “love-have-I”, “love-have-thou”, “love-have-he”, &c. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.

We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where both meaning and meaningless words have been introduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom, and whereas there might be a great many words standing for ant and hill, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as under and on, there would probably be only one word. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for hill, expressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, for under and on being meaningless words not producing any picture in the mind, only one word apiece could very well be used. While under and on were meaning words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, head of, or foot of, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms. It is important to remember this, because this accounts for all the grammars of all languages. As a matter of fact, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, was originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before, that it was much more natural for people to say “rock-on” or “hand-in” than “on the rock” or “in the hand”—though, of course, our arrangement of the words seems the most reasonable to us—because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, while on, in, &c, were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without adding on and in, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop at on and in alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say “on the rock”, we must have the idea of all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind. It is a fact that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun. Das Weib, des Weib-es, dem Weib-e; hom-o, hominis, homini: the meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, he discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. It is just the same with verb-endings as with the case-endings —ich bin, du bist, really express the I and thou twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the -n and -st of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings may be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit “I am” is thus declined:—

 

as-mi I am.          ‘s-mas we are.

a-si thou art.       ‘s-tha ye are.

as-ti he is.            ‘s-anti they are.

 

By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings. As is the root expressing the idea of being, existing; mi is from a root meaning I (preserved in me, Greek and Lat. me, moi, m[ich], &c); so we get as-mi, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The important part of as-mi, the consonants, are preserved in the Latin sum, I am, from which, by some further changes, come the French suis, the Italian sono : the same word appears in our a-m, and in the Greek eimi (Doric esmi), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one of the s’s cut out, and we get a-si, in which the a is the root, and the si the addition signifying thou. To this addition correspond the final s’s in the Latin es, French es—tu es, and the Greek eis (Doric essi). So, again, as-ti, the ti ex­presses he, and this corresponds to the Latin est, French est, the Greek esti, the German ist; in the English the expressive t has been lost. We will not continue the comparison of each word; it will be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin, and give those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves tire tense in its changed form in French or Italian:—

 

English.                                   Sanskrit.                              Latin.

I am                                           as-mi                                   sum.

thou art                                     a-si                                       es.

he is                                           as-ti                                      est.

we are                                       ‘s-mas                                   sumus.

ye are                                        ‘s-tha                                    estis.

they are                                     ‘s-anti                                   sunt.

 

The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters m-s, and if we split these up again we get the separate roots mi and si, so that mas means most literally “I”, and “thou”, and hence “we”. In the second person the Latin has preserved an older form than the Sanskrit; the proper root consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The third person plural cannot be so easily explained.

It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb “to be” is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Saxon had the verb beó contracted from beom (here we have at any rate the m ending for I), I am, byst, thou art, bydh, he is, and the same appear in the German bin, bist. It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours, or even as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Nevertheless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings—m, for I, the first person; s, for thou, the second person; t, for he, the third person; m-s, for I and thou, we; st, for ye, thou and he, ye; nt, for they. And the same reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by themselves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense; so that where we have such a tense as

 

amabam             I was loving.

amabas               thou wast loving.

amabat, &c.       he was loving.

 

we may recognize the meanings of the component parts thus:—

 

ama-ba-m        love-was-I.

ama-ba-s          love-was-thou.

ama-ba-t          love-was-he.

 

Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones—like “rock-on”, “love-was-I”, &c.—in English. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world.

Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. They no longer say “head-of-rock” or “foot-of-rock”, but “rock-on” and “rock-under”. But there are still known languages in which every syllable is a word and where grammar properly speaking does not exist. For grammar, if we come to consider it exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as intelligible as “rock-on” we should have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a monosyllabic language, not because the people only speak in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split up into monosyllables which have a distinctly recognizable meaning. “Ant-hill-on” or “love-was-I”, are like the wards of such a language.

The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through ages of change the “was-I” in our imaginary example got corrupted into “wasi”, where wasi had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be “love-wasi”, of move “move-wasi”, and so on, “wasi"” no longer having a meaning by itself, but “love” and “move” by themselves being perfectly understandable. A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage, because certain grammatical endings (like wasi) are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.

But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has a distinct meaning, and the language arrives at its third stage. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this condition, for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the inflexional. For instance, though we were able to separate “asmi” into two parts—“as” and “mi”—one expressing the idea of being, the other the person “I”, this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom “asmi” simply meant “I am”, without distinction of parts. In our “am” the grammarian recognizes that the “a” expresses existence, and the “m” expresses I; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the “I” before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the “s” of sum “am” and in the “m” “I”; for him sum meant simply and purely “I am”. “I” was no more separable in his eyes than the French êtes (Latin estis) in vous êtes, is separable into a root “es”, contracted in the French into “ê”, meaning are, and an addition “tes” signifying you. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called inflexional, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may indeed remain and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, so that the different case or tense endings can no longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this: homo, a man, the genitive is formed, not by adding something to homo, but by changing homo into hominis, or, if we please, adding something to the root hom—which has in itself no meaning.

Thus, to recapitulate, we discover first two stages which language went through before it presents itself in any form known to us: what we call the meaning words came into existence, and then out of these were gradually formed the meaningless words.

These stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence, for there is no tongue which is not composed in part of words from the meaningless class: though at the same time it is a process which is still going on, as where even and just the adjectives become even and just the adverbs, or where the French substantives pas and point take a like change of meaning. Then after the meaningless words have been acquired come the three other stages which go to the making of the grammar of a language, stages which can be traced in actual living languages, and which have been called the monosyllabic, the agglutinative, and the inflexional stage. With the last of these the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at the inflexional stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars—the Saxon and the Latin; but both, from a mixture of languages and other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs—the past tense and the past participle, use, used; buy, bought, &c.; in other variations in our auxiliary verb, and by changes in our pronouns—I, me, ye, you, who, whom, &c.; and by the “’s” and “s” of the possessive case and of the plural, and by the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, and in their verbs. But these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language.

From this we pass on to examine where the growth of lan­guage has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect.

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE

 

 

Let us recall for a moment the conclusion of the last chapter, and what was said of the different stages of growth through which a language must pass before it arrives at such a condition as that in which are all the tongues with which most of us are likely to be familiar. We found that there were first two very early stages when what may be called the bones of a language were formed, namely, the acquisition first of the meaning words, those words which standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, as pen, ink, paper; secondly, of the meaningless words, which, like to, for, and, produce no idea in the mind when taken quite alone. And we saw that while the first class of words may have rapidly sprung into existence one after another, the meaningless words could only have gradually come into use, as one by one they fell out of the rank of the meaning class. Again, after this skeleton of language had been got together, there were three other stages, we said, which went to make up the grammar of language. The first, the monosyllabic stage, where any word of the language may be divided into monosyllables, each having a distinct meaning ; the second, the agglutinative stage, where the root, that is to say the part of the word which expresses the essential idea, always remains distinct from the additions that modify it; and thirdly, the inflexional stage, where the root and the inflexions have got so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable.

Of course, really to understand what these three conditions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the three; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the languages' of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a language passing out of one stage into another; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the appearance of stages that there seems every reason to believe that a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, language, if nothing stopped its growth.

But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which among nations that have no writing take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men’s memories only. So Homer’s ballads must have passed for several hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as in the course of a generation or two men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but everyone knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being constantly introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. Nay, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts; as we know, for instance, that the language of common people does, differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another. The influence which keeps a language together and tends to make the changes as few as possible is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a sure mark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to the literary language, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. So too the fact that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.

We see therefore the power which writing has of binding together speech and preventing it from slipping into dialects, of keeping the language rich by preserving words which in common everyday life are apt to be forgotten. But writing may also have a disastrous effect upon an unformed language by checking changes which tend to development, and this is just what has happened in the case of Chinese. We know what a strange people the Chinese are, and how they seemed to have stopped growing just at one particular point, and, with all the machinery, so to speak, ready to make them a great people, how they have remained forever a stunted, undeveloped race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their language. While this was still in the first of our three stages—the monosyllabic—the Chinese invented writing, and from that time the language almost ceased to develop, so that it is the best specimen we have of a language in this state. Speaking quite strictly, the ancient Chinese is the only monosyllabic language. Modern Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan are so nearly monosyllabic that they cannot be considered to have got fairly into the agglutinative stage, and perhaps they never will.

As a matter of fact, then, it is writing which has preserved for us a language in the monosyllabic stage, and perhaps nothing but writing could have prevented such a language from in time becoming agglutinative. Other causes are at work to prevent an agglutinative language becoming inflexional. It is not in this case so easy to say what the hindering causes are: but perhaps, if we look at the difference between the last two classes of language, we get some idea. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions—or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the place of am, whom in the place of who—no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form of additions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaning as additions, or in other words, if we were using an agglutinative language we should be able always to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use, and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages. Or we may look at it another way, and say that the cause of the mixing up of the root and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten the word and to save time—a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse: and we guess from these considerations that the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly the case. If the one or two monosyllabic languages belong to peoples who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighborhood, using no large public assemblies, which might take the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Therefore the different dialects and tongues which belong to the agglutinative class are almost endless; and it is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages maybe grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them. These include all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom so many different branches—the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlees, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire—are the most distinguished (and most infamous) in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural mountains to the far east. Another great class, corresponding to these, the Finnish, once spread across the whole of what is now European Russia and North Scandinavia, but has been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, though individual nations have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means “the swiftness of a horse”, from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues.

And now we come to the last—the most important body of languages—the inflexional, and we see that for it have been left all the more important nations and languages of the world. Almost all the “historic” people, living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under this our last division: the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabitants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the globe. Inflexional languages are separated into two main divisions or families, inside each of which the languages are held by a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they recognize their descent from a common ancestor, so languages belong to one family when they can show clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion; it is only when we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations, separated by thousands of miles, different in color, in habits, in civilization, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood.

Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest words of life—kann and can, soll and shall, muss and must, ist and is, gut and good, hart and hard, mann and man, für and for, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, &c, which differ but slightly one from another—we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutschland. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corre­sponding one in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact which was insisted on in the last chapter, that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of vowel are comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language.

For instance, we soon begin to notice that “t” in German is often represented by “d” in English, as tag becomes day; tochter, daughter; breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; but sometimes by “th” in English, as vater becomes father; mutter, mother. Again, “d” in German is often equal to “th” in English, as dorf, thorpe; feder, feather; dreschen, thrash; drangen, throng; das, that. Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, “t”, “d” and” th”, as any one’s ear will tell him if he say te, de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different places; and in the case of the last sound, the, with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound, there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that “ch” in German is often represented by “gh” in English—in such words as tochter, daughter; knecht, knight; möchte, might; lachen, laugh,—we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly durch corresponds to our “through”, the position of the vowels being a matter of comparatively small account. So our power of comparison continually increases, though some knowledge of several languages is necessary before we can establish satisfactory rules or proceed with at all sure steps.

When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same word under various disguises. The interest is very great sometimes, for instance, in the case of proper names. The smaller family—or, as we have used the word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch to which English and German belong—is called the Teutonic branch. To it belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by language with each other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, Genseric, and the like; we compare them at once with Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recognize the termination rik or riks in Gothic, meaning a “king”, and connected with the German reich, and also with the Latin rex—Alaric becomes al-rik, “all-king”, universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiuda-rik, “king of the people”. Again, this Gothic word thiuda is really the same as the German deutsch, or as “Dutch”, of which also “Teutonic” is only a Latinized form. In the same way the Hilda-rik in Gothic is “king of battles”; and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to turn “ch” of Frankish names into “h”, so that instead of Chlovis we first get Hlovis, which is only a softened form of Hludvig, or Hludwig, the modern Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant “famous” and wig a “warrior”, so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same verb “wig” seems to appear in the word Merovingian, a latinized form of Meer-wig, which would mean sea-warrior.

These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got enough to show a very close relationship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks, and had we time many more instances might have been chosen to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been confining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, supposing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many and distant languages. Those words which we have instanced as being common to us and to German, we have both got by inheritance from an earlier language. Yet there are in English hundreds of words which are not acquired by inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption; hundreds of words have been taken directly from the Latin, or from the Latin through the French, or from the Greek, and not derived from any early language which was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English. How shall we distinguish between these classes of words? In the first place, the simpler words are almost sure to be inherited, because people, in however rude a state they were, could never have done without words to express such everyday ideas as to have, to be, to laugh, to make, to kill—I, thou, to, for, and; whereas they might have done well enough without words such as government, literature, sensation, expression, words which express either things which were quite out of the way of these primitive people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and abstract form. Our first rule, therefore, must be to choose the commoner class of words, or generally speaking, those words which are pretty sure never to have fallen out of use, and which therefore must have been handed down from father to son.

There is another rule—that those languages must be classed together which have like grammatical forms. This is the rule of especial importance in distinguishing a complete family of languages. For when once a language has got into the inflected stage, though it may hereafter lose or greatly modify nearly all its inflections, it never either sinks back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the grammatical forms of another language which is also in the inflected condition. These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. We look first for the grammatical forms and then for the simple roots, and according to the resemblance or want of resemblance between them we decide whether two tongues have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near or distant.

Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected languages belong to one of two families called the Semitic and the Aryan. Let us begin with the Semitic. This word, which is only a Latinized way of saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are supposed to be descended from Shem, the second son of Noah. The nations who have spoken languages belonging to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much in Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part in the world while our own ancestors were still wandering- tribes, and at an age when darkness still obscured the doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost among all in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, the earliest of whose recorded kings, Menes, is believed to date back as far as 5000 B.C. Next in antiquity come the Chaldaeans, who have left behind them great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and their successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham himself, we know, was a Chaldaean, and from him descended the Hebrew nation, who were destined to shed the highest honor on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the degeneration of some races and the rise of others, so great may be the divisions which thus spring up between peoples who were once akin, it is also true that all those people, whom the Children of Israel were specially commanded to fight against and even to exterminate—the Canaanites, the Moabites, and the Edomites—were likewise of Semitic family. The Phoenicians are another race from the same stock who have made their mark in the world. We know how, coming first from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they led the way in the art of navigation, sent colonies to various parts of the world, and foremost among these founded Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. Our list of celebrated Semitic races must close with the Arabs, the founders of Mohammedanism, the conquerors at whose name all Europe used to tremble, whose kingdoms once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks of the Indus.

Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of nations; but those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even more conspicuous. This family (which is sometimes called Japhetic, or descendants of Japhet) includes the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic nations, and almost all the peoples of Europe. It may seem strange that we English should be related not only to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the Russians, French, Spanish, Romans, and Greeks as well; stranger still that we can claim kinship with such distant peoples as the Persians and Hindus. Yet such is the case, and the way in which all these different nations once formed a single people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dispersion over the different parts of the world in which we now find them, affords one of the most interesting inquiries within the range of prehistoric study. What seems actually to have been the case is this : In distant ages, somewhere about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt the ancestors of all the nations we have enumerated, forming at this time a single and united people, simple and primitive in their way of life, but yet having enough of a common national life to preserve a common language. They called themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very earliest sense, seems to have meant those who move upwards, or straight; and hence, probably, came to stand for the noble race as compared with other races on whom, of course, they would look down.

How long these Aryans had lived united in this their early home it is, of course, impossible to say; but as the tribes and families increased in numbers, a separation would naturally take place. Large associations of clans would move into more distant districts, the connection between the various bodies which made up the nation would be less close, their dialects would begin to vary, and thus the seeds of new nations and languages would be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a distinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, who stayed at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh and mountains, and in all the fertile valleys which lie there, and another part which advanced farther into the plain; This latter received the name Yavanas, which seems to have meant the protectors, and was probably given to them because they stood as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who still dwelt under the shadow of the mountains, and the foreign nations of the plains. And now, their area being enlarged, they began to get still more separated from each other; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, the space wherein they dwelt became too small for them who had out of one formed many different peoples. Then began a series of migrations, in which the collection of tribes who spoke one language and formed one people started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for ever broke off association with their kindred and their old Aryan home. One by one the different nations among the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected with this new spirit of adventure, and though they took different routes, they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at last.

A not improbable reason has been suggested for these migrations. It is known that, in spite of the immense volume of water which the Volga is daily pouring into it, the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it has been conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago the Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but extended over a large district which is now sandy desert. The slow shrinking in its bed of this sea would, by decreasing the rainfall, turn what was once a fertile country into a desert; and if we suppose this result taking place while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in numbers, the effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding subsistence in the ever-narrowing fertile tract between the desert and the mountains, to seek for new homes elsewhere. This, at any rate, is what they did. First among them, in all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who, travelling perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on to the extreme west. At one time it is most likely that the greater part of Europe was inhabited by Kelts, who either exterminated or partly mingled with the stone-age men whom they found there. As far as we know of their actual extension in historic times, however, we find this Keltic family living in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, over all the continent of Europe west of the Rhine, and in the British Isles. For the Gauls, who then inhabited the northern part of continental Europe west of the Rhine, the ancient Britons, and probably the Iberians, the ancient inhabitants of Spain, belonged to this family. The Highland Scotch, who belong to the old blood, call themselves Gaels, and their language Gaelic, which is moreover so like the old Irish language that a Highlander could make himself understood in Ireland; perhaps he might do so in Wales, where the inhabitants are likewise Kelts. This word Gael is practically the same as Gaul. In the earliest times of the Roman republic the Gauls, as we know, inhabited all the north of Italy, and used often to make successful incursions down the very centre of the peninsula. Beyond the Alps they extended right up into Belgium, which formed part of ancient Gaul. So much for the Celts.

Another of the great families who left the Aryan home was the Pelasgic, or the Graeco-Italic. These, journeying along first southwards and then to the west, passed through Asia Minor, on to the countries of Greece and Italy, and in time separated into those two great peoples, the Greeks (or Hellenes, as they came to call themselves) and the Romans. How little did these rival nations deem that they had once been brothers and travelled together in search of new homes! AH recollection of these early journeyings were lost to the Greeks and Romans, who, when we find them in historic times, had invented quite different stories to account for their origin.

Next we come to two other great families of nations who seem to have taken the game route at first, and perhaps began their travels together as the Greeks and Romans did. These are the Teutons and the Slaves. They seem to have travelled by the north of the Caspian and Black Sea, extending over all the south of Russia, and down to the borders of Greece; then gradually to have pushed on to Europe, ousting the Kelts from the eastern portion, until we find them in the historical period threatening the borders of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. Probably the Teutons pushed on most to the west, and left the Slaves behind. For of the nations who from the beginning of the fifth century of our era began the final invasion and dismemberment of the Roman empire, the major­ity seem to have been Teuton. We have already said what are the nations which compose the Teutonic, or be it, for the words are the same, the Deutsch, or Dutch family. They are the Scandinavians—that is to say, the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the English, the Dutch and Flemings (most of the old Keltic inhabitants of Belgium had been driven out subsequently by Teutonic invaders), and the Germans. Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slaves), about whom we have been hearing a good deal in the papers lately. This name has no etymological connection, as is sometimes ignorantly said, with our word slave, which has dropped out a c between the s and the l. The word Slave comes from slowan, which in old Slavonian meant to speak, and was given by the Slavonians to themselves as the people who could speak, in opposition to other nations whom, as they were not able to understand them, they were pleased to consider as dumb. The Greek word barbaroi (whence our “barbarians”) arose, in obedience to a like prejudice, only from an imitation of babbling such as is made by saying “bar-bar-bar”. The Slavons probably never got farther westward than Bohemia and the north-east of Germany : the greater part of modern Prussia was inhabited by Slaves till about the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. But they spread northward, driving before them the Turanian Lapps and Fins, and southward over all those Turkish provinces about which there is now so much dispute, and again westward into Poland and Bohemia. At the present day the inhabitants of Russia, Poland, Livonia, Lithuania, Bohemia, and most of the South Danubian provinces speak different dialects of the Slavonian tongue.

 

After he has thus classed the different families of nations, another mine of almost infinite wealth is open to the researches of the philologist—a mine too which has at present been only broached. He soon learns the laws governing the changes of sound from one tongue into another. We have noticed some of these experimental laws in the simple relationships as between English and German, where “tag” becomes “day”, “dorf” “Thorpe”, and the like; and all relationships of language are answerable to similar rules. There are laws for the change of sound from Sanskrit into the primitive forms of Greek, Latin, German, English, &c, just as there are laws of change between the first two or the last two. So we soon learn to recognize a word in one language which reappears in altered guise in another. And it may be well guessed how valuable such knowledge may be made. If the word signify some common object, a weapon, a tool, an animal, a house, it is not over-likely that it will have changed from the time when it was first employed : the words of present employment, we know, have little tendency to change. So that the time when this word was first used is in all probability the time when the thing was first known to primitive man; and if the word is common to the whole Aryan family, or if it is peculiar to a portion only, then the thing was known or unknown before the separation of the Aryan folk. It might well have happened that when the migrations began our ancestors were still like the stone-age men of the shell-mounds, still in the hunter con­dition; that they knew nothing of domesticated animals, or of pastures and husbandmen: or it might be again that they had left the pastoral state long behind, and that all their ideas associated themselves with agriculture, with the division of the land, and with the recurring seasons for planting. But language shows us that they had at most only begun some attempts at cultivation, as a supplement to their natural means of livelihood, their flocks and herds: for among the words common to the whole Aryan race there are scarcely any connected with farming, whereas they are redolent of the herd, the cattle-fold, the herdsman, the milking-time. Even the word daughter, which corresponds to the Greek thugatêr and the Sanskrit duhitar, means in the last language “the milker”, and that seems to throw back the practice of milking to a vastly remote antiquity.

On the other hand, the various Indo-European branches have different names for the plough, one name for the German races, another for the Graeco-Italic, and for the Sanskrit. And though aratrum has a clear connection with a Sanskrit root ar, it is not absolutely certain that it ever had in this language the sense of ploughing, and not merely of wounding, whence came the expression for ploughing as of wounding the earth.

Or say we wish to form some notion of the social life of the Aryans. Had they extended ideas of tribal government? Had they kings, or were they held together only by the units of family life? Our answer would come from an examination of their common word for “king”. If they have no common word, then we may guess that the title and office of kingship arose among the separate Aryan people and received a name from each. Or is it that their common word for king had first some simpler signification, “father”, perhaps, showing that among the Aryan folk the social bond was still confined within the real or imaginary boundary of the family? But in fact we do find a common word for king in several of the languages which has no subsidiary meaning less than that of directing, or keeping straight. This is the Latin rex, the Gothic riks, Sanskrit rig, &c, and its earliest ascertainable meaning was “the director”. The Aryans then, even in those days, acknowledged as supreme some director chosen (probably) from out of the tribe, a chief to lead their common war­like or migratory expeditions.

These are but illustrations of the method upon which all conclusions touching these our ancestors are founded, and the manner of our knowledge concerning them; far better obtained than merely by gazing upon the instruments which have fallen from their hands, or the monuments they might have raised to commemorate the dead. It is in fact just the difference between Shakespeare’s statute in Westminster Abbey and that “livelong monument” whereof Milton spoke. By perfecting beyond the power of any other race the wonderfully complex faculty of speech the Aryans secured that their memory should be handed on the more certainly, and with far greater completeness, than by records left palpable to men’s eyes and hands. Many of their secret thoughts might be unlocked by the same key. Already the same means are being used to give us glimpses of their religious ideas. For the names of the common Aryan gods can be arrived at by just the same comparative method: it may well happen that a name which is only a proper name in one language, can in another be traced to a root which unravels its original meaning. It is as with the word daughter. Here the Sanskrit root seems to unravel the hidden—the lost, and so hidden—meaning in the Greek or English words. So with a god, the meaning, hidden in the name from those who used it in prayer or praise, becomes revealed to us by the divining rod of our science.

And it is true, nevertheless, that the mine of wealth thus opened has as yet been but cursorily explored. There are far more and greater fish in this sea than ever came out of it. A strictly scientific method might be found for classifying and tracing the changes which words undergo. Sometimes a word is found greatly modified; sometimes it survives almost intact between the different tongues. There must be some reason for this.

The question might be answered by means of an elaborate classification under the head of the alterations which words have experienced, and such a comparative vocabulary would lead to the solution of infinite questions concerning the growth of nations. We should be able to look almost into the minds of people long ago, better than we can examine the minds of contemporary races in a lower mental condition, and see what ideas took a strong hold upon them, what things they treated as realities, what metaphorically, and how large for them was the empire of imagination. Then there is the boundless region of proper names, both those of persons and geographical names. These last in every country bear a certain witness to the races who have passed through that country, and show—roughly at least—the order of their appearance there. The older geographical names are those of natural features, rivers, mountains, lakes, which have been never absent from the scene; the newer names are given to the works of man. In our own country it is so. The names of our rivers (Thames, Ouse, Severn, Wye) are Keltic, i.e. British; those of our towns are Teutonic, Saxon, or Norse. Some few Roman names linger on, as in the name and termination “Chester”; but this, as meaning a place of strength, shows us clearly the reason of its survival. Every European country has changed hands, as ours has done; nay, every country in the world. So here again we have promise of plenty of work for the philologist in compiling a “Glossary of Proper Names” with etymologies.

Lastly, let it not be forgotten that a great part of all that has been done for the Aryan can be done likewise for the Semitic languages—a field scarcely yet turned by the plough; and the reader will confess the debt the world is likely some day to owe to Comparative Philology.

 

 

As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or half-civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now it is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a history, is the oldest. '

Are we not justified, therefore, in considering this Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation�the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation�of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples ? "\V e may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first re�corded King of Egypt. And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone and been possessed, at any rate, of bronze. The second date, 4000 b.c., probably marks the beginning of the more extended stone-age life of Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent completed civilizations,

" Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit auhelis Illic sera rubens ascendit luniina Vesper."

The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 4000 b.c., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of thepyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old, whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elabo�rately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead�f or what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds and the temples, but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens ?�recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. But with them co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,�in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldaeans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself,�not quite of either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed too with their animal worship were some lofty religious conceptions sketching not only beyond it�the animal worship�but beyond that " natural," poly�theism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans; and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher facts due to the influx of Semitic blood ? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought.

During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ�five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distauce through which toff lookback to the.place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain ? Or, in plainer language, what was the life of the other peoples of the world at this time ? Perhaps in two places upon the globe and no more might then have been found a civilization at all comparable with that of Egypt. These places are the Tigro-Euphrates valley and China.

The kingdom of the Chakkeans lay in the lower regions of the Tigris and Euphrates, where these rivers approach their streams to one another and to the Persian Gulf. The land through which the rivers flow is a broad alluvial plain, lying like Egypt closely encompassed by sandy desert, so as to form the second oasis (Egypt being the first), whieh breaks the monotonous belt of waste land stretching south-west and north-east, across the whole of our older hemisphere. It was natural that these two fruitful plains�rivalling each other in productiveness of soil � should be the earliest hotbeds for unfolding the germs of civilization planted by Turanian men.

It is here, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. " And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."�Genesis xi. 2. Here too is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. The oldest monuments of the country show it inhabited by a mixed people speaking a language Semitic in form, but Cushite and also Turanian in vocabulary. Here therefore the Turanian element was more marked than upon the banks of the Nile.

The civilization was also later than in Egypt. The earliest chronicles upon which we can place reliance begin about 2234 B.C., with Nimrod "the son of Cush," i.e. of Cushite or Ethio�pian race. This was not many hundred years before the time of Abraham. The cities which he built were, says the Bible, Erech and Ur (the present Warka and Mugheir), Accad and Calneh, of all which some monumental remains are still left. After a while the reigning family of Nimrod gave place�whether through conquest or not we do not know�to another, still of the same race, coming from Elam, a neighbor coun�try including part of the mountainous country north of the Tigro-Euphrates basin; and this country was incorporated with older Chaldiea. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudurla-gomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider em�pire. He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldaja. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. " And when Abraham heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servauts, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people."�Gen. xiv.

The conquest of a powerful Chaldsean king by a handful of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldasans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldsean dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one, that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of the old Chaldsean was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the southern portion�the old Chaldsea�of which Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All this belongs to history�or at least to chronicle�and is therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry.

The Chinese profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It i? therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early times then is to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book�the Book of Odes�by their sage Confucius.¹ The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book �the Book of Changes�dates, that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these '^mply> had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving one, but not devoid of piety and domestic affection. This, then, is the third civilization which may- have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turauian-Semitic civi�lizations of Egypt and Ohaldasa. To these three may we add a fourth, and believe in the great antiquity of the highest civilization of the red race ? The trace of an early civiliza�tion in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldeea, is undoubted; but there is nothing to show that the identity in some of their features extended to an identity in their respective epochs.

A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many nations which started into life during the thousand years following that date of 3000 b.c., which we have taken as our starting-point. Most conspicuous among these stand the Phoenicians, who, either in their early home upon the sea-coast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans. But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one particular family or clan was called by God to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch him, now joining with some small city king ao-ainst another, now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the destruction of that city. And all through we are not now reading dry dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of that old time.¹ To us�whose lives are so unsimple�the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd's trade, these people�for all their glorious destiny�lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or Chaldaea; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.

Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many of the characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a nation of shepherds that they were excluded from the national life of Egypt. For long years after their departure thence they led a wandering life, and though when they entered Palestine they found cities ready for their occupation�for the nations which they dispossessed were for the most part settled people, builders of cities�and inhabited them, and, growing corn and wine, settled partly into an agricultural life, yet the chief wealth of the nation still probably consisted in their flocks, and the greater portion of the people still dwelt in tents. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the people of the north, for even so late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to free themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know how Jeroboam cried out, "To your tents, oh Israel." " So Israel departed unto their tents " the narrative continues. After the separation we are told that Jeroboam built several cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites generally may be summed up as the constant expression and the ultimate triumph of a wish to exchange their simple life and theocratic government for one which might place them more on a level with their neighbor states. At first it is their religion which they wish to change, whether for the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious creeds of Asiatic nations; and after a while, madly forgetful of the tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a king to reign over them in order that they may "take their place" among the other Oriental monarchies. Still their first two kings have rather the character of military leaders, the monarchy not having become hereditary; the second, the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel's sons, was himself in the beginning no more than a simple shepherd. But under his son Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, the country attains (like Rome under Augustus) the summit of its splendor and power, and then enters upon its career of slow and sad decline.

Xow let us turn to the Japhetic people�the Aryans. It is curious that the date of three thousand years before Christ, from which we started in our glance over the world, should also be considered about that of the separation of the Aryan people. Till that time they had continued to live�since when we know not�in their early home near the Oxus and Jaxartes, and we are able by the help of comparative philology to gain some little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding the separation. For taking a word out of one of the Aryan languages and making allowance for the changed form which it would wear in the other tongues, if we find the same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the languages of the family, we may fairly assume that the thing for which it stands was known to the old Aryans before the separation. And' if again we find a word which runs through all the European lauguages, but is not found in the Sanskrit and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger Aryans, from whom it will be remembered'all the European branches are descended. Thus we get a very interesting list of words, and the means of drawing a picture of the life of our primaeval ancestors. The earliest appear�ance of the Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. Daughter, we saw, meant originally "the milker"; the name of money, and of booty, in many Aryan languages is derived from that of cattle;¹ words which have since come to mean lord or prince originally meant the guardian of the cattle;² and others which have expanded into words for district or country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply the pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the king had grown out of the head of the family, and the pens of their sheepfolds expanded iuto walled cities. But though a pastoral, they do not seem to have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turanian civilization had pretty well departed from Asia by that time, and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldasa, lived on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Kelts and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till about two thousand years before Christ, and it may be that this date, which is also nearly that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Pelasgic family, as well as by the Kelts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Japhetites be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time when they again become known to history.

The general result then of our inquiries into the grouping of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At a very early date, say 4000 or 5000 b.c., arose an extensive Turanian half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Southern Asia, spread in time to India and China upon one side, on the other side to Europe. This was through�out, so far as we can tell, a stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising- of great tombs and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated to the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, a mixed people�Semite, Turanian, Ethiopian� who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had probably even then a con�siderable past. Chaldea too and China were both advanced out of their primitive state; possibly so also were Peru and Mexico. But the pure Semite people, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 2000 b.c. came the separation of the various peoples of the Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo-Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they found in Europe. Such were the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the old world in times long before history.

 

We have seen, so far, that the early traces of man's existence point to a gradual improvement in the state of his civilization, to the acquirement of fresh knowledge, and the practice of fresh arts. The rude stone implements of the early drift-period are replaced by the more carefully manufactured ones of the polished-stone age, and these again are succeeded by implements of bronze and of iron. By degrees also the arts of domesticating animals and of tilling the land are learnt; and by degrees the art of writing is developed from the early pictorial rock-sculptures. Now, in order that each step in this process of civilization should be preserved for the benefit of the next generation, and that the people of each period should start from the vantage-ground obtained by their pre�decessors, there must have been frequent intercommunication between the different individuals who lived at the same time; so that the discovery or improvement of each one should be made known to others, and become part of the common stock of human knowledge. In the very earliest times, then, men probably lived collected together in societies of greater or less extent. We know that this is the case now with all savage tribes; and as in many respects the early races of the drift-beds seem to have resembled some now existing savage tribes in their mode of life, employing, to a certain extent, the same implements, and living on the same sort of food, this adds to the probability of their gregariousness. The fact, too, that .the stone implements of the drift-period have generally been found collee ted near together in particular places, indicates these places as the sites of early settlements. Beyond this, however, we can say very little of the social state of these drift-bed people. No trace of any burial-ground or tomb of so great an antiquity has yet been found, and all that we can say of them with any certainty is, that their life must have been very rude and primitive. Although they were collected together in groups, these groups could not have been large, and they must have been generally situated at a considerable distance from each other, for the only means for support for the men of that time was derived from hunting and fishing. Now it requires a very large space of land to support a man who lives entirely by hunting; and this must have been more particularly the case in those times when the weapons used by the huntsman were so rude that it is difficult for us now to understand how he could ever have succeeded in obtaining an adequate supply of food by such means. Supposing that the same extent of territory were required for the support of a man in those times as was required in Australia by the native population, the whole of Europe could only have supported about 76,000 inhabitants, or about one person to every 4,000 now in existence.

The earliest traces of anything like fixed settlements which have beeu found are the " kitchen-middens.'" The extent of some of these clearly shows that they mark the dwelling-places of considerable numbers of people collected together. But here only the rudest sort of civilization could have existed, and the bonds of society must have been as primitive and simple as they are among savage tribes at the present time, who support existence in much the same way as the shell-mound people did. In order that social customs should attain any development, the means of existence must be sufficiently abundant and easily procurable to permit some time to be devoted to the accumulation of superfluities, or of supplies not immediately required for use. But the life of the primitive hunter and fisher is so precarious and arduous, that he has rarely either the opportunity or the will for any other employ�ment than the supply of his immediate wants. The very uncertainty of that supply seems rather to create recklessness than providence, and the successful chase is generally followed by a period of idleness and gluttony, till exhaustion of sup�plies once more compels to activity. That the shell-mound people were subject to such fluctuation of supply we may gather from the fact that bones of foxes and other carnivorous animals are frequently found in those mounds; and as these animals are rarely eaten by human beings, except under the pressure of necessity, we may conclude that the shell-mound people were driven to support existence by this means, through their ill-success in fishing and hunting, and their want of any accumulation of stores to supply deficiencies.

The next token of social improvement that is observable is in the tumuli or grave-mounds, which may be referred to a period somewhat later than that of the shell-mounds. These contain indications that the people who constructed them possessed some important elements necessary to their social progress. They had a certain amount of time to spare after providing for their daily wants, and they did not spend that time exclusively in idleness. The erection of these mounds must have been a work of considerable labor, and they often contain highly-finished implements and ornaments, which must have been put there for the use of the dead. They are evidences that no little honor was sometimes shown to the dead; so that some sort of religion must have existed amongst the people who constructed them. The importance of this element in early society is evident if we inquire further for whom and by whom these mounds were erected. Now they are not sufficiently numerous, and are far too' laborious in their construction, to have been the ordinary tombs of the common people. They were probably tombs erected for chiefs or captains of tribes to whom the tribes were anxious to pay especial honor. We do not know at all how- these separate tribes or clans came into existence, and what bonds united their members together; but so soon as we find a tribe erecting monuments in honor of its chiefs, we may conclude that it has attained a certain amount of compactness and solidity in its internal relations. Amongst an uneducated people there is probably no stronger tie than that of a common faith, or a common subject of reverence. It is impossible not to believe then that the people who made these great, and in some cases elaborately constructed tombs, would continue ever after to regard them as in some sort consecrated to the great chiefs who were buried under them. Each tribe would have its own specially sacred tombs, and perhaps we may here see a germ of that ancestor-worship which may be traced in every variety of religious belief.

It has been supposed by some that a certain amount of com�merce or barter existed in the later stone age. The reason for thi s opinion is that implements of stone are frequently found in localities where the stone of which they are made is not native. At Presigny le Grand, in France, there exists a great quantity of a particular kind of flint which seems to have been very convenient for the manufacture of implements; for the fields there are covered with flint-flakes and chips which have been evidently knocked off in the process of chipping out the knives, and arrowheads, and hatchets which the stone-age men were so fond of. Now implements made of this particular kind of flint arc found in various localities, some of which are at a great distance from Presigny; and it has therefore been supposed that Presigny was a sort of manufactory for flint weapons which were bartered to neighboring tribes, and by them again perhaps to others further off; and so these weapons gradually got dispersed. But it is also possible that the tribes of the interior, who would subsist almost exclusively by hunting, and would therefore be of a more wandering disposition than those on the sea-coast, may have paid occa�sional visits to this flint reservoir for the purpose of supplying themselves with weapons of a superior quality, just as the American Indians are said to go to the quarry of Coteau des Prairies on account of the particular kind of stone which is found there.

In any case, any system of barter which was carried on at that time was of a very primitive kind, and not of frequent enough occurrence to produce any important effects on the social condition of the people. That that condition had already advanced to some extent from its original rudeness, shows us that there existed, at all events, some capacity for improvement among the tribes which then inhabited Europe; but, when we compare them with modern tribes of savages, whose apparent condition is much the same as theirs was, and who do not seem to have made any advance for a long period, or, so far as we can judge, to be capable of making any advance by their own unassisted efforts, we cannot but conclude that the stone-age people, if left to themselves, would only have emerged out of barbarism by very slow degrees. Now we know that, about the time when bronze implements first began to be used, some very important changes also occurred in the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Europe. A custom of burning the dead supersedes then the older one of burial; domestic animals of various sorts seem to have been introduced, and the bronze implements themselves show, both in the elaborateness of their workmanship and the variety of their designs, that a great change had come over European civilization. The greatness and completeness of this change, the fact that there are no traces of those intermediate steps which we should naturally expect to find in the development of the arts, denote that this change was due to some invading population which brought with it the arts that had been perfected in its earlier home; and other circumstances point to the East as that earlier home from which this wave of civilization advanced. Language has taught us that at various times there have been large influxes of Aryan populations into Europe. To the first of these Aryan invaders probably was due the introduction of bronze into Europe, together with the various social changes which appear to have accompanied its earliest use. To trace then the rise and progress of the social system which the Aryans had adopted previous to their appearance in Europe, we must go to their old Asiatic home, and see if anv of the steps by which this system had sprung up, or any indications of its nature, may be extracted from the records of antiquity.

Hitherto scarcely any attempt has been made to discover or investigate pre-historic monuments in the East. We can no longer therefore appeal to the records of early tombs or temples, to the indications of early seats of population; but though as yet this key to Aryan history has not been made available, we have another guide ready to take us by the hand, and show us what sort of lives our ancestors used to lead in their far-off Eastern home. That guide is the science of Language, which can teach us a great deal about this if we will listen to its lessons : a rich mine of knowledge which has as yet been only partially explored, but one from which every day new information is being obtained about the habits and customs of the men of pre-historic times.

All that we know at present of the Aryan race indicates that its social organization originated in a group which is usually called the Patriarchal Family, the members of which were all related to each other either by blood or marriage. At the head of the family was the patriarch, the eldest male descendant of its founder. The other members, consisting of all the remaining males descended on the father's side from the original ancestor, and their wives, and such of the females also descended on the father's side from the same ancestor as ay ere still unmarried. To show more clearly exactly Avhat people Avere members of a patriarchal family, we will trace such a family for a couple of generations from the original founder. Suppose then the original founder married, and with several children, both sons and daughters. All the sons would continue members of this family. The daughters would only continue members until they married, when they Avould'eease to be members of the family of their birth, and become members of their respective husbands' families. So when the sons of the founder married, their wives would become members of the family; and such of their children as were sons would be members, and such as were daughters would be members only until they married; and so on through succeeding generations. On the founder's death he would be succeeded as patriarch by his eldest son. On the eldest son's death, he would be succeeded by hix eldest son, if he had a son; and if not, then by his next brother. The patriarchal family also included in its circle, in later times at all events, slaves and other people, who, although perhaps not really relations at all, were adopted into the household, assumed the family name, and were looked upon for all purposes as if its actual members. This little group of individuals seems originally to have existed entirely indepen�dent of any external authority. It supported itself by its own industry, and recognized no other law or authority than its own. The only source of authority within this little state was the patriarch, who was originally regarded, not only as the owner of all the property of which the family was possessed, but also as having unlimited power over the different individuals of which it was composed. All the members lived together, under the same roof, or within the same enclosure. No member could say that an}' single thing was his own property. Everything belonged to the family, and every member was responsible to the patriarch for his actions.

Although originally the power of the patriarch may have been almost absolute over the other members of the family, it must very early have become modified and controlled by the growth of various customs. Indeed, in trying to picture to ourselves these early times, when as yet no regular notions of law had arisen, it is important to remember how great a force was possessed by custom. Even now, when we dis�tinguish pretty clearly between law and custom, we still feel the great coercive and restraining powers of the latter in all the affairs of life. But when no exact notions of law had been formed, it seemed an almost irresistible argument in favor of a particular action that it had always been performed before. There would thus spring up in a household certain rules of conduct for the different members, certain fixed limits to their respective family duties. Before any individual would be commanded by the patriarch to do any particular duty, it would come to be inquired whether it was customary for such a duty to be assigned to such an individual. Before the patriarch inflicted any punishment on a member of the family, it would come to be inquired whether and in what manner it had been customary to punish the particular act complained of. Many things would tend to increase this regard for custom. The obvious advantages resulting from regularity and certainty in the ordering of the family life would soon be felt, and thus a public opinion in favor of custom would be created. Ancestor-worship too, which plays so conspicuous a part in early Aryan civilization, acted, no doubt, as a powerful strengthener of the force of custom, as is indicated by the fact that in man}' nations the traditionary originator of their laws is some powerful ancestor to whom the nation is accustomed to pay an especial reverence.

Resulting from this development of custom into law in the early family life of the Aryans, we find that special duties soon became assigned to persons occupying particular positions. To the young men of the household were assigned the more active outdoor employments; to the maidens the milking of the cows; to the elder Women other household duties. And the importance of knowing what the customs were also gave rise to the family council, or " sabh& " as it is called in Sanskrit, which consisted of the elders of the family, the " sabhocita," presided overbythe "sabhapati," or president of the assembly. The importance attached to the decisions of this council was so great, that the " sabya," or decrees of tha " sabha," came to be used simply to express law or custom. It is probable therefore that this assembly regulated to a great extent the customs and laws of the family in its internal management and also superintended any negotiations carried on with other families. To complete our picture of the patriarchal family, we have the traditions of three distinct customs affecting its internal economy. Two of these, the maintenance of the sacred house-fire, and the marriage ceremony, probably date back to a very remote period; and the third, the custom of adoption, though of later development, may be regarded, in its origin at least, as primitive. Fire is itself so wonderful in its appearance and effects, so good a servant, so terrible a master, that we cannot feel any surprise at its having attracted a great deal of attention in early times. The traces of fire-worship are so widely spread over the earth that there is scarcely a single race whose traditions are entirely devoid of tham. But the sacred house-fire of the Aryans is interesting to us chiefly in its connection with other family customs in which it played an important part. This fire, which was perpetually kept burning on the family hearth, seems to have been regarded, in some sort, as a living family deity, who watched over and assisted the particular family to which it belonged. It was by its aid that the food of the family was cooked, and from it was ignited the sacrifice or the funeral pyre. It was the centre of the family life; the hearth on which it burned was in the midst of the dwelling, and no stranger was admitted into its presence. When the members of the family met together to partake of their meals, a part was always first offered to the fire by whose aid they were prepared; the patriarch acted as officiating priest in this as in every other family ceremony; and to the patriarch's wife was confided the especial charge of keeping the fire supplied with fuel.

By marriage, as we have seen, a woman became a member of her husband's family. She ceased to be any longer a member of the household in which she was born, for the family life was so isolated that it would have been impossible to belong at once to two different families. So we find that the marriage ceremony chiefly consisted in an expression of this change of family by the wife. In general, however, it was preceded by a treaty between the two families, a formal offer of marriage made by the intending husband's family on his behalf, together with a gift to the bride's family, which was regarded as the price paid for the bride. If all preliminary matters went forward favorably, then, on the day fixed for the marriage, the different members of the bridegroom's family -went to the household of the bride and demanded her. After some orthodox delay, in which the bride was expected to express unwillingness to go, she was formally given up to those who demanded her, the patriarch of her household solemnly dismissing her from it and giving up all authority, over her. She was then borne in triumph to the bridegroom's house; and, on entering it, was carried over the threshold, so as not to touch it with her feet; thus expressing that her entry within the house was not that of a mere guest or stranger. She was then, before the house-fire, solemnly admitted into her husband's family, and as a worshipper at the family altar.

This ceremony was subject to a great many variations amongst the different Aryan races; but in every one of them some trace of it is to be found, and always apparently intended to express the same idea, the change of the bride's family. Adoption, which in later times became extremely common among the Romans�the race which seems in Europe to have preserved most faithfully the old Aryan family type �originated in a sort of extension of the same theory that admitted of the wife's entry into her husband's family, as almost all the details of the ceremony of adoption are copied from that of marriage. Cases must have occurred pretty often where a man might be placed in such a position as to be without a family. He may have become alienated from his own kindred by the commission of some crime, or all his relatives may have died from natural causes or been killed in war. In the condition in which society was then, such a man would be in a peculiarly unenviable position. There would be no one in whom he could trust, no one who would be the least interested in or bound to protect him. Thus wandering as an outlaw, without means of defence from enemies, and unable to protect his ^possessions if he chanced to have any, or to obtain means of subsistence if he had none, he would "be very desirous of becoming a member of some other family, in order that he might find in it the assistance and support necessary for his own welfare. It might also sometimes happen, that owing to a want of male descendants some house might be in danger of extinction. Now the extinction of a family was a matter of peculiar dread to its members. Connected with the worship of the hearth was the worship of the ancestors of the family. It was the duty of each patriarch to offer sacrifices on stated occasions to the departed spirits of his ancestors; and it was considered as a matter of the utmost importance that these sacrifices should be kept up, in order to insure the happiness of those departed spirits after death. So important indeed was this held to be, that it was reckoned as one of the chief duties which each patriarch had to perform, and the family property was regarded as especially dedicated to this object in priority to every other. It would therefore be the ehief care of each head of a household to leave male descend�ants, in order that the offerings for his own and his ancestor's benefit might be continued after his death. The only person, however, capable of performing these rites was a member of the same family, one who joined in the same worship by the same household fire: so if all the males of a family were to die out, these rights must of necessity cease.

Now the marriage ceremony had already supplied a precedent for introducing members into a house who were not born in it. It was very natural, then, that this principle should be extended to the introduction of males when there was any danger of the male line becoming extinct. This was done by the ceremony of adoption, which was in many respects similar to that of marriage, being a formal renunciation of the person adopted by the patriarch of his original family, in case he was a member of one, and a formal acceptance and admission into the new family of his adoption, of which he was thenceforward regarded as a regular member. This ceremony exhibits in a very marked manner the leading peculiarity of the patriarchal household. We see how completely isolated, in theory, such a group was from the rest of the world; having its own distinct worship, in which no one but its own members were permitted to share, reverencing its own ancestors only, who might receive worship from none but their descendants. So jealously was this separation of families guarded, that it was impossible for a man or woman at the same time to worship at two family shrines. Though showing this isolation in the strongest light, adoption is nevertheless a mark of decay in the patriarchal family. It is an artificial grafting on the original simple stock; and however carefully men may have shut their eyes at first to its artificial nature, it must have had a gradual tendency to undermine the reverence paid to the principle of blood relationship.

Before we consider, however, the causes of decay of this form of society, which we shall do in the next chapter, there are some other indications of their manner of livelihood which will help us to understand the social condition of these Aryan patriarchal families. We have seen that with the introduction of bronze into Europe, certain other changes took place in the manner of men's lives. One of these is the domestication of animals. It is true that domestic animals were not altogether unknown before the bronze age in Europe: but until that time this custom had not attained any great extension. In remains of settlements whose age is supposed to be before the introduction of bronze, by far the larger number of animals' bones found are those belonging to wild species, while those belonging to tame species are comparatively rare. This shows that the principal part of the food of those people who lived before the bronze age was obtained by hunting. After the introduction of bronze, however, exactly the reverse is the case. In these later remains the bones of domestic animals become much more common, while those of wild animals are comparatively rare, which shows what an important revolution had taken place in men's habits.

It must also be remembered that many remains supposed to belong to the later stone age may, in fact, belong to societies that existed during the bronze age, but who had not yet adopted the use of bronze, or else from their situ�ation were unable to obtain any. As vet so little is known of how this metal was obtained at that time, that it is impossible to say what situations would be least favorable for obtaining it; but considering that tin, of which bronze is partly composed, is only found in a very few places, the wonder is rather that bronze weapons are found so generally amongst the different remains scattered over Europe, than that they should be absent from some of them. More�over, the races that inhabited Europe before the Aryans came there would afterwards remain collected together in settle�ments, surrounded by the invading population, for a consider�able length of time before they would either be exterminated or absorbed by the more civilized race. These aborigines would adopt such of the arts and customs of the Aryans as were most within their reach. The increased population and the greater cultivation of the land which followed the Aryan invasion would make it more difficult to obtain food from hunting, and the aborigines would therefore be compelled to adopt domestication of animals as a means of support, which they would have little difficulty in doing, as they would be able to obtain a stock to start from, either by raids on their neighbors' herds or, perhaps, by barter. But the manufacture of bronze weapons, being a much more complicated affair than the rearing of cattle, would take a much longer time to ac�quire. This perhaps may account for the remains found in the lake-dwellings, some of which show a considerable degree of social advance, but an entire ignorance of the use of bronze, while in the later ones bronze weapons are also found. We may then regard the domestication of animals as one of the customs introduced into Europe by the Aryans, and as prac�tised by them in their Asiatic home. It was on their flocks and herds that they chiefly depended for subsistence, and the importance of the chase as a means of livelihood was very much less with them than it was with the old hunter-tribes that formed the earlier population of Europe. This in itself was a great advance in civilization. It implied a regular in�dustry, and the possession of cattle was not only a guarantee against want, but an inducement to a more regular and orderly mode of living.

There are no lessons so important to uncivilized nations as those of providence and industry, and the pastoral life re�quired and encouraged both these qualities. It was necessary to store up at one time of year food to support the cattle during another time; to preserve a sufficient number of animals to keep the stock replenished. The cows too had to be milked at regular times, and every night the flocks and herds had to be collected into pens to protect them from beasts of prey, and every morning to be led out again to the pasture. All this shows the existence of a more organized and methodical life than is possible in a hunter-tribe. The pastoral life, more�over, seems to be one particularly suited to the patriarchal type of society. Each little community is capable of supplying its own wants, and is also compelled to maintain a certain degree of isolation. The necessity of having a considerable extent of country for their pasturage would prevent different families from living very near each other. In its simplest state, too, the pastoral life is a nomadic one; so that the only social connection which can exist among such a people is one of kinship, for having no fixed homes they can have no settled neighbors or fellow-countrymen. The importance attached to cattle in this stage of civilization is evidenced by the frequent use of words in their origin relating to cattle, in all the Aryan languages, to express many of the ordinary inci�dents of life. Not only do cattle occupy a prominent place in Aryan mythology, but titles of honor, the names for divisions of the day, for the divisions of land, for property, for money, and many other words, all attest by their derivation how prominent a position cattle occupied with the early Aryans. The patriarch is called in Sanskrit " lord of the cattle," the morning is " the calling of the cattle," the even�ing " the milking time." The Latin word for money, pecimia, and our English word "fee"both come from the Aryan name for cattle. In Anglo-Saxon movable property is called " cwic-feoh," or living cattle, while immovable property, such as houses and land, is called " dead cattle." And so we find the same word constantly cropping up in all the Aryan languages, to remind us that in the pastoral life cattle are the great interest and source of wealth of the community, and the principal means of exchange employed in such commerce as is there carried on.

The commerce between different tribes or families seems to have been conducted at certain meeting-places agreed upon, and which were situated in the boundary-land or neutral territory between the different settlements. Almost habitually at war with each other, or at best only pre�serving an armed and watchful quiet,�each side ready at a moment's notice to seize on any favorable opportunity for the commencement of active hostilities,�regular friendly intercourse was impossible. So that when they wished for their mutual advantage to enter into amicable relations, it was necessary to establish some sort of special agreement for that purpose. It is probable, then, that when they found the advantages which could be derived from commercial exchanges, certain places were agreed upon as neutral territory where these exchanges might take place. Such places of exchange would naturally be fixed upon as would be equally convenient to both parties; and their mutual jealousy would prevent one tribe from permitting the free entrance within its own limits of members of other tribes. Places, too, would be chosen so as to be within reach of three or four different tribes; and thus the place of exchange, the market-place, would be fixed in that border-land to which no tribe laid any special claim.

So we see that to commerce was due the first amicable relations of one tribe to another, and perhaps our market crosses may owe their origin to some remains of the old ideas connected with assemblies where men first learnt to look upon men of different tribes as brothers in a common humanity.

It took a long time, however, to mitigate that feeling of hostility which seems to have existed in early times between different communities. Even when they condescended to barter with each other they did not forget the difference between the friend and the foe. In the Senchus Jlor, a book compiled by the old Irish or " Brehon " lawyers, this difference between dealing with a friend and a stranger is rather curiously indi�cated in considering the rent of land. " The three rents," says the Great Hook of the Law, as it is called, " are rack rent (or the extreme rent) from a person of a strange tribe, a fair rent from one of the tribe (that is one's own tribe), and the stipulated rent, which is paid equally by the tribe and the strange tribe." This distinction is generally recognized in all early communities. In dealing with a man of his own tribe, the individual was held bound in honor not to take any unfair advantage, to take only such a price, to exact only such a value in exchange, as he was legitimately entitled to. It was quite otherwise, however, in dealings with' members of other tribes. Then the highest value possible might justly be ob�tained for any article; so that dealings at markets which consisted of exchanges between different tribes, came to mean a particular sort of trading, where the highest price possible was obtained for anything sold. It is probable that this cast, to a certain extent, a slur upon those who habitually devoted themselves to this kind of trading. Though it was recognized as just to exact as high .a price as possible from the stranger, still the person who did so was looked upon to a certain extent as guilty of a disreputable action; viewed, in fact, much in the same light as usurious money lenders are viewed nowadays. They were people, who did not offend against the laws of their times, but who sailed so near the wind as to be tainted, as it were, with fraud. Indeed, our word "monger," which simply means "dealer," comes from a root which, in Sanskrit, means "to deceive;" so commerce and cheating seem to have been early united, and we must therefore not be surprised if they are not entirely divorced in popular estimation even in our own time.

Now "mark," which, as we know, means a boundary or border-land, comes from a root which means " the chase," or "wild animals." So "mark" originally meant the place of the chase, or where wild animals lived. This gives us some sort of notion of these early settlements, whose in-dwellers carried on their commerce with each other in this primitive fashion. They were little spots of cleared or cultivated land, surrounded by a sort of jungle or primeval forest inhabited only by wild beasts. It was in such wild places as these that the first markets used to be held. Here under the spreading branches of the trees, at some spot agreed upon be�forehand,�some open glade, perhaps, which would be chosen because a neighboring stream afforded means of refreshment, �the fierce distrustful men would meet to take a passing glimpse at the blessings of peace. These wild border-lands which intervene also explain to us how it was that so great an isolation continued to be maintained between the different settlements. If their pasture-lands had bordered on each other immediately, if the herds of one tribe had grazed by the herds of another, there must have been much more intercom�munion and mutual trust than appears to have existed.

The value of cattle, however, does not consist only in the food and skins which they provide. Oxen have from a very early time been employed for purposes of agriculture; and we find among the names derived from cattle many suggesting that they must have been put to this use at the time when those names arose. Thus the Greeks spoke of the evening as " boulutos," or the time for the unyoking of oxen; and the same idea is expressed in the old German word for evening " abant " (abend), or the unbinding. This then is the next stage in social progress: when agriculture becomes the usual employment of man. With the advance of this stage begins the decay of the patriarchal life, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, gradually disappears and gives place to fresh social combinations. Though we have hitherto spoken only of the patriarchal life amongst the Aryans, it was still more characteristic of the Semitic race. They were essentially pastoral and nomadic in their habits, and they seem to have continued to lead a purely pastoral life much longer than the Aryans did. In the Old Testament we learn how Abraham and Lot had to separate because their flocks were too extensive to feed together; and how Abraham wandered about with his flocks and herds, his family and servants, dwellers in tents, leading a simple patriarchal life, much as the Arabs of the present day do. Long after the neighboring people had settled in towns, these Semitic tribes continued to wander over the intervening plains, depending for food and clothing only on their sheep and cattle and camels. 7

 

CHAPTER VII

the tillage community.

 

So long as people continued to lead a wandering shepherd life, the institution of the patriarchal family afforded a sufficient and satisfactory basis for such cordial union as was possible. It was a conditiun of society in which the relations of the different members to each other were extremely simple and confined within very narrow boundaries; but the habits of life prevented the existence of any very complicated social order, and at the same time gave a peculiar force and endur�ance to those customs and ties which did exist. For while the different tribes had no settled dwelling-places, the only cohesion possible was that produced by the personal relations of the different members to each other. Those beyond the limits of the tribe or household could have no permanent connection with it. They were simply " strangers," friends or enemies, as circumstances might determine, having no common interests, connected by no abiding link, with those who were not members of the same community. When a family became so numerous that it was necessary for its members to separate, the new family, formed under the influence of this pressure, would at first remember the parent stock with reverence, and perhaps regard the patriarch of the elder branch as entitled to some sort of obedience from, and possessing some indefinite kind of power over, it after separa�tion. It would however soon wander away and lose all connec�tion with its relatives, forgetting perhaps in the course of time whence it had sprung, or inventing a pedigree more pleasing to the vanity of its members. But when men began to learn to till the soil, by degrees they had to abandon their nomadic life, and to have for a time fixed dwelling-places, in order that they might guard their crops, and gather, in the time of harvest, the fruits of their labor. Cattle were no longer the only means of subsistence, nor sufficiency of pasture the only limit to migration. A part of their wealth was, for a time, bound up in the land which they had tilled and sowed, and to obtain that wealth they must remain in the neighborhood of the cultivated soil. Thus a new relationship arose between different families. They began to have neighbors; dwellers on and cultivators of the land bordering- their own; so that common interests sprang up between those who had hitherto had nothing in common, new ties began to connect together those who had had formerly no fixed relations.

The adoption of agriculture changed likewise the relation of men to the land on which they dwelt. Hitherto the tracts of pasture over which the herdsman had driven his flocks and cattle had been as unappropriated as the open sea, as free as the air which he breathed. He neither claimed any property in the land himself, nor acknowledged any title thereto in another. He had spent no labor on it, had done nothing to improve its fertility; and his only right as against others to any locality was that of his temporary sojourn there. But when agriculture began to require the expenditure of labor on the land, and its inclosure, so as to protect the crops which had been sown, a new distinct idea of the possession of these inclosed pieces of land began to arise, so that a man was no longer simply the member of a particular family. He had acquired new rights and attributes, for which the patriarchal economy had made no provision. He was the inhabitant of a particular locality, the owner and cultivator of a particular piece of land. The effect of this change was necessarily to weaken the household tie which bound men together, by introducing new relations between them. The great strength of that early bond had consisted in its being the only one which the state of society rendered possible; and its force was greatly augmented hy the isolation in which the different nomadic groups habitually lived. The adoption of a more permanent settlement thus tended in two ways to facilitate the introduction of a new social organization. By increasing the intercourse, and rendering more permanent the connection between different families, it destroyed their isolation, and therefore weakened the autocratic power of their chiefs; and at the same time, by introducing new interests into the life of the members of a family, and new relations between different families, it required the adoption of regulations sometimes necessarily opposed to the principles of patriarchal rule. We must remember, however, that the change from a nomadic to a settled state took place very gradually, some peoples being influenced by it much more slowly than others. Agriculture may be practised to a certain extent by those who lead a more or less wandering life, as is the case with the Tartar tribes, who grow buckwheat, which only takes two or three months for its production; so that at the end of that time they are able to gather their harvest and once more wander in search of new pastures. It is probable that the earliest agriculture practised was something of this rude description; and even when tribes learnt the advantage of cultivating more slowly-germinating crops, they would not readily abandon their nomadic habits, which long continuance rendered dear to them; but would only become agriculturists under the pressure of circumstances. The hunter tribes of North American Indians, and the Gipsies of Europe, serve to show us how deeply rooted the love of wandering and the dislike to settled industry may become in a people. It was probably to the difficulty of supporting existence produced by the increase of population that the more continuous pursuit of agriculture was due; and it would therefore be first regularly followed by the less warlike tribes, whose territory would be curtailed by the incursions of their bolder neighbors. No longer able to seek pasture over so extended an area as formerly, and with perhaps an increasing population, they would find the neces�sity of obtaining from the land a greater proportionate supply of subsistence than they had hitherto done. Agriculture would therefore have to be pursued more regularly and laboriously, and thus the habit of settlement would gradually be acquired. Under this influence we may discern a change taking place in the social state of the Aryan-tribes. Gradually they become less nomadic and more agricultural; and as this takes place, there arises also a change in the relations of peoples to each other. We should naturally expect considerable variety in the effects produced on different nations by the adoption of a settled life; the results varying with the climate and locality, the sort of cultivation followed, and the idiosyncrasies of the people. But though all these elements had their influence in determining the sort of organization which was adopted, j-et one special type is found very widely among the Aryans. This form is called the Village Community, and it possesses some features apparently so peculiarly its own, that it would be difficult to decide on the cause of its adoption or growth. It will be safer with our present limited knowledge to satisfy ourselves with noting its more marked characteristics, and the localities in which it may be traced, without attempting to determine whether it is to be regarded as a natural resultant of the settlement of patriarchal families, or as inherited or evolved by some par�ticular group of tribes.

The village community in its simplest state consisted of a group of families, or households, whose dwellings were generally collected together within an inclosure. To this group belonged a certain tract of land, the cultivation and proprietor�ship of which was the subject of minute regulations, varying in different localities to a certain extent, but based on the division of the land into three principal parts, one of which consisted of that immediately in the neighborhood of the dwellings, another of a part specially set aside for agricultural purposes, and the remaining third was the surrounding open country, which was used only for grazing. Each of these divisions was regarded as in some sort the common property of the village; but the rights of individuals in some of them were more extensive than in others. That part of the land which was annexed especially to the dwellings was more completely the property of the different inhabitants than any other. Each head of a house was entitled to the particular plot attached to his dwelling, and probably these plots, and the dwellings to which they were annexed, remained always practically in the ownership of the same family. The area of this division, however, was very insignificant when com�pared with the rest of the communal estate. The arable part was divided into a number of small plots, each or several of which were assigned to particular households. The mode of division of this part was very various; but generally speaking, either each household had an equal share assigned to it, or else a share in proportion to the number of its males. Redistributions of the shares took place either at stated periods, or when over circumstances had rendered the existing division inequit�able. Each household cultivated the particular share assigned to it, and appropriated to its own use the crops produced; but individuals were never allowed to adopt for themselves the mode of cultivation that they might choose. The crops to be sown, and the part of land on which they were to be sown, were all regulated by the common assembly of the whole village, as were also the times for sowing and for harvest, and every other agricultural operation; and these laws of the assembly had to be implicitly followed by all the villagers. The open or common land of the village was not divided between the households at all; but every member of the community was at liberty to pasture his flocks and herds upon it.

In their relations to each other the villagers seem to have been on a footing of perfect equality. It is probable that there existed generally some sort of chief, but his power does not appear to have been very great, and for the most part he was merely a president of their assemblies, exercising only an influence in proportion to his personal qualifications. The real lawgivers and rulers of this society are the different individuals which compose the assembly. These, however, do not comprise all the inhabitants of the village. Only the heads of the different families were properly included in the village assembly. But the household has no longer the same extended circle as formerly, and, so far as we can gather, there seems to have been little check on the division of families and the formation of new households.

It must be borne in mind, however, that we have no existing institution exactly resembling the village community, as we may suppose it must have originally been. As with the patriarchal family, we meet with it only after it has undergone considerable modification, and we have to reconstruct it from such modified forms and traditions as remain to us. Many minor details of its nature are therefore neces�sarily matters of speculation. The community, however, may still be found in a changed form in several localities; notably among the peasantry of Russia, and the native population of India; and its former existence among the Teuton tribes is attested by evidence of the clearest description. With each of these peoples, however, the form is somewhat varied from what we may conclude to have been its original nature; in each country it has been subject not only to the natural growth and development which every institution is liable to, but to special influences arising from the events connected with the nation's history, and from the nature and extent of its territory. But before we inquire what these different in�fluences may have been, let us notice first certain leading characteristics of this group, and consider how they may have arisen.

The first thing that attracts observation is the change in the source of authority in this community from that which existed in the patriarchal family. The ruling power is no longer placed in the hands of an individual chief, but is vested in an assembly of all the householders. The second marked peculiarity is the common possession of the land by the village, combined with the individual possession of goods of a mov�able nature by the different members. These may be said to be the two essentials of a true village community. Now the change from the patriarchal to this later social form may have taken place by either of two processes�the extension of an individual family into a community, or the amalgamation of various families. Probably both of these processes took place; but wherever anything like the formation of a village community has been actually observed, and the process has occasionally been discernible even in modern times in India, it is due to the former of the two causes indicated. This mode of formation also appears to have left the most distinct impress on society, and we will therefore notice first how it probably acted.

When a family had devoted itself to agricultural pursuits, and settled in a fixed locality, one of those divisions of its members might take place which probably were of frequent occurrence in the nomadic state. Although theoretically we speak of the patriarchal family as united and indivisible, yet as a matter of fact we know that such was not always the case, and that families must frequently have either split up, or else sent off little colonies from their midst. Now as we have already pointed out, the settlement of the family would have a marked effect in preserving a permanent connection between itand its offspring; so that the separation would be by no means so complete as formerly. The sub�sidiary family would continue in close intercourse with the elder branch, and would enjoy with it the use of the land which had been appropriated. In course of time it might happen that a whole group of families would thus become settled near each other, all united by a common origin and enjoying in common the land surrounding the settlement; for the necessity for mutual protection, which would often arise, would alone be a strong inducement to preserve the neigh�borhood of those who from kinship were by nature and tradi�tion allies. And although each separate family would continue in its internal relations the peculiarities of the patriarchal rule, the heads of the different families would be related to each other on quite a new principle. They would no longer be members of one family all subservient to a common chief, but they would still be united by the bond of their common interests.

There would thus spring up a new relationship between the family chiefs, a relationship not provided for in the construction of the patriarchal family. We might expect perhaps that a special pre-eminence would be accorded to the original family from which the others had separated, and possibly some traces of this pre-eminence may here and there be discovered. But, for some reason which has not hitherto received any explanation, the general principle of equality among the different heads of households prevailed. As we do not know exactly by what process families became divided, it is useless to speoulate how this equality arose. Another effect produced by settlement has already been indicated; namely, the decrease of the power of the patriarch within his own circle. The family having ceased to be the bond of union, though the units composing the new combina�tion were themselves groups constructed on the patriarchal type, the fact that they were, now only parts of larger groups had the effect of weakening the force of patriarchal customs. When the household was the only state of which an individual was a member, to leave it was to lose all share in its rights and property. But when the family became part of the village, the facilities for separating from it were necessarily increased. Households would more readily subdivide, now that after separation their component parts continued united in the community. Thus by degrees the old patriarchal life decayed and gave place to this new and more elastic social formation. The importance of an individual's relation to the family became less, that of the family to the com�munity became greater; so that by degrees the community absorbed the regulation of many affairs originally within the exclusive power of the patriarch. A new lesson has also been learnt with regard to property. It is difficult to discern whether, in the older group, the property was regarded as exclusively that of the chief, or as belonging to the family collectively. The truth seems to be that the two ideas were blended, and neither was conceived with any completeness. In the later group for the first time each form of property becomes fully developed; either kind producing a clearer idea of the other by their contrast. The land, the bond of union, and the limit of the extent of the community, remained the common property of all; in part, no doubt, because the idea of possessing land was still so new that it had not been thoroughly grasped. The produce of the land, whether corn or pasture, was rather regarded as a proper subject of possession; and though at first, in obedience to the habits of their former life, this may also have been looked upon as common property, it did not long continue so, as the separation of the households remained too complete to permit of any community with regard to the actual homestead, or of the produce required for the support of each household; and this separation of goods by the force of circumstances soon extended to cattle and the produce of the harvest.

The effects produced by their new relation to each other on the members of this group were very important. Hitherto such idea of law as existed was confined to the mandates or traditional regulations of the patriarchs. Law too appears at first inseparably connected with religion. It was looked upon as a series of regulations handed down from some ancestor who received them by divine inspiration. This notion of the origin of law is so general, that it is to be met with in the traditions of almost every nation. Thus we find the Egyp�tians reputing their laws to the teachings of Hermes (Thoth) ; while the lawgivers of Greece, Minos, and Lycurgus, arc inspired, the one by Zeus, the other by Apollo. So too the Iranian lawgiver Zoroaster is taught by the Good Spirit ; and Moses receives the commandments on Mount Sinai. Now though this idea of law is favorable to the procuring obedience to it, it produces an injurious effect on the law itself, by render�ing it too fixed and unalterable. Law, in order to satisfy the requirements and changes of life, should be elastic and capable of adaptation ; otherwise, regulations which in their institution were beneficial will survive to be obnoxious under an altered condition of society. But so long as laws are regarded as divine commands they necessarily retain a great degree of rigidity. The village community, in disconnecting the source of law from the patriarchal power, tended to destroy this association. The authority of the patriarch was a part of the religion of the early Aryans; he was at once both the ruler and the priest of his family ; and though this union between the two characters long continued to have a great influence on the conception of law, the first efforts at a distinction between divine and hu�man commands sprang from the regulations adopted by the assembly of the village. The complete equality and the joint authority exercised by its members was an education in self-government, which was needed to enable them to advance in the path of civilization, teaching them the importance of self-dependence and individual responsibility.

Those who learnt that lesson best displayed in their history the greatness of its influence, having gained from it a vigor and readiness to meet and adapt themselves to new require�ments never possessed by the absolute monarchies which sprang from tribes unacquainted with any other principle than that of patriarchal government. The history of the various states which sprang up in Asia, each in its turn to be overwhelmed in a destruction which scarcely left a trace of its social influence, exhibits in a very striking manner the defects which necessarily ensue when a people ignorant of social arts attempts to form an extensive scheme of government. The various races raised to temporary power by the chances of war in the East, were, generally speaking, nomadic tribes whose habits had produced a hardihood which enabled them to conquer with ease their effeminate neighbors of the more settled districts, but whose social state was not sufficiently advanced to allow them to carry on any extended rule. Used only to their simple nomadic life, they were suddenly brought face to face with wants and possessions of which they had hitherto had no experience, and which lay beyond the bounds of their customs or ideas. They contented themselves with exacting from the conquered such tribute as they could extort, leaving their new subjects to manage their own affairs much as they had done before, till the conquerors, gradually corrupted by the luxuries which their position afforded, and having failed to make for themselves any firm footing in their new empire, were in their turn overwhelmed by fresh hordes of nomadic invaders. The mighty empire of Rome too fell; but how different a record has she left behind ! Having learnt in her earliest infancy, better perhaps than any other nation, how to reconcile the conflicting theories of the household and the community, she never flagged in her study of the arts of government. Early imbued with a love of law and order, her people discovered also how to accommodate their rules to the various conditions of those which came under their sway. Her laws penetrated to the remotest boundaries of her possessions, and the rights of a Roman citizen were as clearly defined in Briton as in Rome itself. Thus the Romans have left behind them a system of law the wonder and admiration of all mankind, and which has left indelible marks on the laws and customs, the arts and civilization, of every nation which once formed part of their dominions.

Such were among the influences following the adoption of the village community; but such influences only gradually asserted themselves, and the extent of their development was very various among different peoples. In India, the religious element in the household had always a peculiar force, and its influence continued to affect to a great extent the formation of the community. There this organization never lost sight of the patriarchal power, and has exhibited a constant tendency to revert to the more primitive social form. Among the Slavonic tribes the community seems to have found its most favorable conditions, and some of the reasons for this are not difficult to discern. The Slaves in Russia have fora longtime had open to them an immense fact of thinly inhabited country, their only rivals to the possession of which were the Finnish tribes of the north. Now the village community is a form peculiarly adapted for colonization, and this process of colonizing fresh country by sending out detachments from over grown villages seems to have gone on for a long time in Russia; so that the communities which still exist there present a complete network of relationship to each other; every village having some mother-village from which it has sprung. Having thus a practically boundless territory for their settlement, none of those difficulties in obtaining land which led to the decay of the village in western Europe affected the Russians in their earlier history. With the Teutons the village had a somewhat different history. It is difficult to determine exactly to what extent it existed among them; but traces of its organization are still discoverable among the laws and customs of Germany and England. The warlike habits of the German tribes, however, soon produced a marked effect on its organization. The chief of the village, whether hereditary or elective, was generally possessed of but little power. Among a warlike people, however, the necessity for a captain or dictator must have been much greater than with peaceful tribes; for war requires, more than any other pursuit, that it should be conducted by an individual will. Among the peaceful inhabitants of India or Russia the village head-man was generally some aged and venerable father exercising a sort of paternal influence over the others through the reverence paid to his age and wisdom. With the Teutons, however, their habits gave an excessive importance to the strength and vigor of manhood, and they learnt to regard those who exhibited the greatest skill in battle as their natural chieftains.

 

CHAPTER VIII.

religion.

 

We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of inventions which had for their end the supply of material wants, or the ordering of conditions which should enable men to live peaceably together in companies, and defend the pro�ducts of their labor from the attacks of rival tribes and neighbors. A very little research into the relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of language or by examining into the traces left in ancient sites, abundant proof to show that the material wants of life did not alone occupy the thoughts of our remote ancestors any more than our own, and that even while the struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations towards the invisible source of life and light they felt to be around them, occupied a large space in their minds. God did not leave them without witness at any time, but caused the "invisible things to be shown by those that do appear.'.' And even in the darkest ages and among the least favored races, there were always to be found some minds that vibrated, however feebly, to the suggestions of this teaching, and shaped out for themselves and their tribe some conception of a Divine Ruler and His government of the world from those works of His hands of which their senses told them. Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced beyond their earliest beginnings, religious rites and funeral rites had no doubt been established in every tribe, and men's thoughts about God and His relationship to His creatures had found some verbal expression, some sort of creed in which they could be handed down from father to son and form a new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back these rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human mind is capable of contemplating�nothing less indeed than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such points as appear to be decided by revela�tion, accept on others the results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is obtained.

The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It has helped in two ways: first, by. tracing the names of ohjects of worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship. Secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names, apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of the same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research was applied to them.

The discovery of a closer relationship than had been for�merly suspected between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from what may be called the grown-up form in which we first become acquainted with them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern people among whom they originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander, beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and Hindus is not unlike our search in a perfected language for its earliest roots. We lose shapeli�ness and beauty as we come back, but we find the form that explains the birth of the thought, and lets us see how it grew in the minds of men. One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds, and by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and heroes, is the discovery that a worship of different aspects and forces of nature lies at the bottom of all mythologies, and that the cause of the resem�blance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them together) is, that they are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it is pre�sented to us. The heroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead of thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles and Thor, as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and Idun, and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of the sun's march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the ten�derly glowing and fading colors of the western sky into which he sinks when his course is run.

Our first feeling in receiving this simple explanation of the puzzling old stories is rather one of disappointment than of satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal�not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the essence of religion�spirituality�and reduce them to mere observations of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language, with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and yearning towards the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the explanation which seemed at first to impoverish, really enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light.

It teaches us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears at first sight.

When we were considering the beginnings of language, we learned that all root-words were expressions of sensations received from outward things, every name or word being a description of some bodily feeling, a gathering-up of impres�sions on the senses made by the universe outside us. With this stock of words�pictorial words we may call them�it is easy to see that when people in early times wanted to express a mental feeling, they were driven to use the word which expressed the sensation in their bodies most nearly corre�sponding to it. We do something of the same kind now when we talk of warm love, chill fear, hungry avarice, and dark revenge�mixing up words for sensations of the body to heighten the expression of emotions of the mind. In using these expressions we are conscious of speaking allegorically, and we have, over and above our allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for describing mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding them together. But in early times, before words had acquired these varied and enlarged meanings, when men had only one word by which to express the glow of the body when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend was near, the difficulty of speaking, or even thinking, of mental and bodily emotions apart from each other must have been very great. Only gradually could the. two things have become disentangled from one another, and during all the time while this change was going on an alle�gorical way of speaking of mental emotions and of the source of mental emotions must have prevailed. It is not difficult to see that while love and warmth, fear and cold, had only one word, to express them, the sun, the source of warmth, and God, the source of love, were spoken of in much the same terms, and worshipped in songs that expressed the same adoration and gratitude. It follows, therefore, that while we acknowledge the large proportion in which the nature element comes into all mythologies, we need not look Upon the wor�shippers of nature as worshippers of visible things only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine cause which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and beauty appealed to their wonder, and they loved and worshipped the Unseen while naming the seen only. As time passed on and language developed, losing much of its original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks and Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular beliefs about the gods and the spirit of true worship which originally lay behind them. People no longer felt the influence of nature in the double method in which it had come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began to distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, between the things that lay without and the emotions stirred within. Then the old nature beliefs became degraded to foolish and gross superstitions, and the yearning soul sought God in a more internal way.

The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those which concern us most nearly, entering as they do into the very composition of our language, and coloring not only our literature and poetry, but our baby-songs and the tales told in our nurseries. We shall find it interesting to compare toge�ther the various forms of the stories told by nations of the Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest shape. But before entering on this task it may be well to turn our attention for a little while to a still earlier mythology, where the mingling of metaphysical conceptions with the worship of natural phenomena is perhaps more clearly shown than in any other, and which may therefore serve as a guide to help us in grasping this connection in the more highly-colored, picturesque stories we shall be hereafter attempting to unravel. This earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the an�cient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to retain primitive forms unchanged, even when, as was the case with their hieroglyphics, they had to use them to express more developed thoughts than the forms could well hold. That they followed this course with their religious cere�monies and in their manner of representing their gods, is perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to trace with greater ease the particular aspect of nature, and the mental sensation or moral lesson identified with it, which each one of their gods and goddesses embodies. We have the rude primitive form embodying an aspect or force of nature, and instead of a beautiful confusing story, merely for the most part titles, addresses, and prayers, whose purport more or less reveals the spiritual meaning which that aspect of nature conveyed to the worshipper.

The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the same, or nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that even among different races, living far apart and having no connection with each other, a certain similarity in the stories told about gods and heroes, and in the names and titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the moon, the sky, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness, night and day, summer and winter�these objects and changes must always make the staple, the back-bone so to speak, round which all mytho�logical stories founded on nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery, especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features of a country, have a strong influence in modifying the impressions made by these objects on the ima�ginations of the dwellers in the land, and so giving a special form or color to the national creed, bringing perhaps some divine attribute or some more haunting impression of the condition of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown elsewhere. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was dis�tinguished from that of other nations by several such cha�racteristics, and in endeavoring to understand them we must first recall what there is distinctive in the climate and scenery of Egypt to our minds.

The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a delta-shaped valley, broad at its northern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is always blue, and from morning till evening^ intensely bright, flecked only occa�sionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the sun's course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious color behind the white cliffs in the west, can he traced unimpeded day after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which receive the sun's first and last greeting, stretches a boundless waste�the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each morning, and back into which it returned when the valley was left to darkness and night.

The neighborhood of the desert, and the striking contrast between its lifeless wastes and the richly-cultivated plains between the hills, had, as we can see, a great effect on the imaginations of the first inhabitants of the land of Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts about death and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to the dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrast was a perpetual parable to them, or rather perhaps a perpetual memento mori. The valley between the cliffs presented a vivid picture of active and intense life, every inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of labor�budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy sowers, and reapers, and builders; resounding, too, everywhere with brisk sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of anvil and hammer, the creaking of water-wheels, the bleating and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp of the oxen treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the laughter of children playing by the river. On the other side of the cliffs, what a change! There reigned an unbroken solitude and an intense silence, such as is only found in the desert, because it comes from the utter absence of all life, animal or vegetable: no rustle of leaf or bough, no bum of an insect, or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed stillness even for a minute. There is silence, broad, unbroken sunshine, bare cliffs, rivers of golden sand�-nothing else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians called the western desert into which, as it seemed to them the sun went down to sleep after his day's work was done; Amenti, the vast, the grand, the unknown, and it was there they built their most splendid places of worship, and there they carrried their dead for burial, feeling that it spoke to them of rest, of unchangeable-ness, of eternity.

Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery was the beautiful river�the one only river�on which the prosperity, the very existence, of the country depended. It, too, had a perpetual story to tell, a parable to unfold, as it flowed and swelled and contracted in its beneficent yearly course. They saw that all growth and life depended on its action; where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness and beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vegetable, and insect life; where its furthest wave stayed, there the reign of nothingness and death began again. The Nile therefore became to the ancient Egyptians the token and emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that perpetual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into another, which has ever had so much hopeful significance for all thinking minds. Its blue color, reflecting the sky, was the most sacred of their emblems, and was devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life over death, of the permanence of the life principle amid the evanescent and vanishing forms under which it appeared. Of these two dis�tinctive features of nature in Egypt, the unexplored western desert and the unending river, we must then think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect on the impressions pro�duced on the minds of ancient Egyptians by those aspects of nature which they had in common with other Eastern people. Let us think what these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance over the eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless sky; sending down fierce perpendicular rays through all the hot noon, withdrawing his overwhelming heat towards evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting the western sky with color and glory, on which the eyes of men could rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last behind the white rocks in the west. And then the moon�white, cold, changeable, ruling the night and measuring time. Besides these, the countless hosts of stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food for man from its bosom; the glowing blue sky at noon and the purple midnight heaven; the moving wind; the darkness that seemed to eat up and swallow the fight.

Now let us see how the ancient- Egyptians personified these into gods, and what were the corresponding moral or spiritual ideas of which each nature-power spake to their souls. We shall find the mythology easier to remember and understand if we group the personifications round the natural objects whose aspects inspired them, instead of enumerating them in their proper order as first, second, and third class divinities. So for the present we will class them as Sun-Gods, Sky-Gods, Wind-Gods, &c. ; and we will begin with the sun, which among the ancient Egyptians occupied the first place, given, as you will see, to the sky among our Aryan ancestors. The sun indeed not only occupies the most conspicuous position in Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many characters and under so many aspects, that he may be said to be the chief inspiration, the central object of worship, nothing else indeed coming near to his grandeur and his mystery. It is to be remarked, however�and this is a distinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship�that the mystery of the sun's disappearance during the night and his reappearance every morning, is the point in the parable of the sun's course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest significance, and to the personification of which they gave the most dignified place in their hierarchy of gods. Atum or Amun, " the concealed one," was ,the name and title given to the sun after he had sunk, as they believed, into the under-world ; and by this name they worshipped the concealed Creator of all things, the " Dweller in Eternity," who was before all, and into whose bosom all things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented this their oldest and most venerable deity was that of a man, sometimes human-headed and sometimes with the man's face concealed under the head and horns of a ram�the word ram meaning concealment in the Egyptian language. The figure was colored blue, the sacred color of the Source of Life. Two derivations are given for the name Amun. It means that which brings to light ; but it also expresses the simple invi�tation " Come," and in this sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the ritual, where Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the under-world in the ages before creation, and on " a day " speaking the word " Come," when imme�diately Osiris and Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared before him in the under-world.

The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious set�ting exercised perhaps a still greater power over the thoughts of the Egyptians, and was personified by them into a deity, which, if not the most venerable, was the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the name given from the earliest times to the kind declining sun, who appeared to them to veil his glory, and sheathe his dazzling beams in a lovely, many-colored radiance, which soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men, and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the dread orb from which during the day they had been obliged to turn their eyes. The god who loved men and dwelt among them, and for their sakes permitted himself to be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness�it was thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun's evening beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades of night, amplifying it, as the needs of the human heart were more distinctly recognized, into a real foreshadowing of that glorious truth towards which the whole human race was yearning�the, truth of which these shows of nature were indeed speaking continually to all who could understand. The return of Osiris every evening into the under world in�vested him also, for the ancient Egyptians, with the character of guardian and judge of souls who were supposed to accom�pany him on his mysterious journey, or at all events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the realm of souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore filled a place both among the gods of the living and those of the dead. He was the link which connected the lives of the upper and the under world together, and made them one�the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit realm to which they were all bound. Two distinct personifications showed him in these characters. As the dweller among men and the sharer of the commonness and materiality of their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of a bull�the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed constantly to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of another on the death of the animal, but never abandoning the land of his choice, or depriving his faithful worshippers of his visible presence among them. In his character of Judge of the Dead, Osiris was represented as a mummied figure, of the sacred blue color, carrying in one hand the rod of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and wearing on his head the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In the judgment scenes he is seated on a throne at the end of the solemn hall of trial to which the soul has been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the fateful balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the heart of the man is weighed against a symbol of Diviue Truth.

Next in interest to the setting sun is the personification under which the Egyptians worshipped the strong young sun, the victorious conqueror of the night, who each morning ap�peared to rise triumphant from the blank realm of darkness, in which the rays of yesterday's sun had been quenched. They figured him as the eldest son of Osiris, Horus, the vigorous bright youth who loved his father, and avenged him, piercing with his spear-like ray the monster who had swallowed him up. Horus is represented as sailing up the eastern sky from the under world in a boat, and slaying the serpent Night with a spear as he advances. The ultimate victory of life over death, of truth and goodness over falsehood and wrong, were the moral lessons which this parable of the sun's rising read to the ancient Egyptians. The midday sun ruling the heavens in unclouded glory, symbolized to them majesty and kingly authority, and was worshipped as a great and powerful god under the name of Ra, from which name the title given to their kings, Phra, was derived.

Though these four appearances may well seem to exhaust all the aspects under which the sun can be considered, there are still several other attributes belonging to him which the ancient Egyptians noticed and personified into yet other sun-gods. These we will enumerate more briefly. Pthath, a god of the first order, worshipped with great magnificence at Memphis, personified the life-giving power of the sun's beams, and in this character was sometimes mixed up with Osiris, and in the ritual is spoken of also as the creative principle, the " word " or " power " by which the essential deity revealed itself in the visible works of creation. Another deity, Mandoo, appears to personify the fierce power of the sun's rays at midday in summer, and was looked upon as the god of vengeance and destruction, a leader in war, answering in some measure, though not entirely, to the war-gods of other mythologies. There were also Gom, Moui, and Kons, who are spoken of always as the sons of the sun god, those who reveal him or carry his messages to mankind, and in them the rays, as distinguished from the disk of the sun, are no doubt personified. The rays of the sun had also a feminine per�sonification in Pasht, the goddess with the lioness's head. To her several different and almost-opposite qualities were attri�buted: as indeed, an observer of the burning and enlightening rays of an Eastern sun might be doubtful whether to speak oftenest of the baleful fever-heat with which they infect the blood, or of their vivifying effects upon the germs of animal and vegetable life. Thus the lioness goddess was at once feared and loved; dreaded at one moment as the instigator of fierce passions and unruly desires, invoked at another as the giver of joy, the source of all tender and elevating emotions. Her name, Pasht, means the lioness, and was perhaps suggested bythe fierceness of the sun's rays, answering to the lion's fierce strength or the angry light of his eyes. She was also called the " Lady of the Cave," suggesting something of mystery and concealment. Her chief worship was at Bubastis; but, judging from the frequency of her representations, must have been common throughout Egypt.

We will now take the second great light of the heavens, the moon, and consider the forms under which it was personified by the Egyptians. Rising and setting like the sun, and dis�appearing for regular periods, the moon was represented by a god, who, like the god of the setting sun, occupied a con�spicuous position among the powers of the under world, and was closely connected with thoughts of the existence of the soul after death, and the judgment pronounced on deeds done in the body. Thoth, "the Word," the "Lord of Divine Words," was the title given to this deity; but though always making one in the great assemblage in the judgment-hall, his office towards the dead does not approach that of Osiris in dignity. He is not the judge, he is the recorder who stands before the balance with the dread account in his hand, while the trembling soul awaits the final sentence. His character is that of a just recorder, a speaker of true words ; he wears the ostrich feather, the token of exact rigid evenness and impar�tiality, and yet he is represented as having uneven arms, as if to hint that the cold white light of justice, untempered by the warmth of love, cannot thoroughly apprehend what it seems to take exact account of, leaving, after all, one side unembraced, unenlightened, as the moonlight casts dense shadows around the spots where its beams fall. The silent, watching, peering moon ! Who has not at times felt an inkling of the parable which the ancient Egyptians told of her cold eye and her unwarming rays which enlighten chilly, and point out while they distort ?

In spite of his uneven arms, however, Thoth (the dark moon and the light moon) was a great god, bearing sway in both worlds in accordance with his double character of the revealed and the hidden orb. On earth he is the great teacher, the inventor of letters, of arithmetic, and chronology; the " Lord of Words," the " Lover of Truth," the " Great and Great." Thoth was sometimes represented under the form of an ape; but most frequently with a human figure ibis-headed; the ibis, on account of his mingled black and white feathers, symbolizing the dark and the illumined side of the moon.

Occasionally, however, he is drawn with a man's face, and bearing the crescent moon on his head, surmounted by an ostrich feather; in his hand he holds his tablets and his recording pencil.

The sky divinities were all feminine among the Egyptians; representing the feminine principle of receptivity, the sky being regarded by them mainly as the abode, the home of the sun and moon gods. The greatest of the sky deities was Maut, the mother, who represents the deep violet night sky, tenderly brooding over the hot exhausted earth when the day was over, and wooing all living things to rest, by stretching cool, protecting arms above and around them. The beginning of all things, abysmal calm, but above all motherhood, were the metaphysical conceptions which the ancient Egyptians connected with the aspect of the brooding heavens at midnight, and which they worshipped as the oldest primeval goddess, Maut. The night sky, however, suggested another thought, and gave rise to yet another personification. Night does not bring only repose; animals and children sleep, but men wake and think; and, the strife of day being hushed, have leisure to look into their own minds, and listen to the stilL small voice that speaks within. Night was thus the parent of thought, the mother of wisdom, and a personification of the night sky was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom. She was named Neit; a word signifying " I came from myself," and she has some attributes in common with the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athene, whose warlike character she shared. Nu, another sky goddess, who personifies the sunlit blue midday sky may also on other accounts claim kinship with the patroness of Athens. She is the life-giver�the joy-inspirer. Clothed in the sacred color which the life-giving river reflects, the midday sky was supposed to partake of the river's vivifying qualities, and its goddess Nu is very frequently pictured as seated in the midst of the tree of life, giving of its fruits to faithful souls who have completed their time of puri�fication and travel in the under-world, and are waiting for admission to the Land of A.oura, the last stage of preparation before they are received into the immediate presence of the great gods.

Two other aspects of the sky were considered worthy of personification and worship. The morning sky, or perhaps the eastern half of the morning sky, which awaited the sun's earliest beams, and which was called Sate, and honored as the goddess of vigilance and endeavor, and the beautiful western sky at even, more lovely in Egypt than anywhere else, to the exaltation of which the Egyptians applied their prettiest titles and symbols. Hathor, the " Queen of Love," was the name they gave to their personification of the evening sky, speaking of her at once as the loving and loyal wife of the sun, who received the wearied traveller, the battered con�queror, to rest on her bosom after his work was done, and the gentle household lady whose influence called men to their homes when labor was finished, and collected scattered families to enjoy the loveliest spectacle of the day, the sunset, in company. Hathor is represented as a figure with horns, bearing the sun's disk between them, or sometimes carrying a house upon her head.

The sky, however, with the ancient Egyptians, did not include the air; that again was personified in a masculine form, and regarded as a very great god, some of whose attri�butes appear to trench on those of Osiris, and Pthath; Kneph was the name given to the god who embodied the air, the living breath or spirit; and he was one of the divinities to whom a share in the work of creation was attributed. He is represented in a boat, moving over the face of the waters, and breathing life into the newly-created world. He was no doubt connected in the minds of pious Egyptians with thoughts of that breath of God by whose inspiration man became a living soul; but in his nature aspect he perhaps personified the wind blowing over the Nile valley after the inundation, and seeming to bring back life to the world by drying up the water under which the new vegetation was hidden.

The soil of the country thus breathed upon, which responded to the rays of Osiris and the breath of Kneph by pouring forth a continual supply of food for men, was naturally enough personified into a deity who claimed a large share of devotion, and was worshipped under many titles. Isis, the sister-wife of Osiris, was the name given to her, and so much was said of her, and so many stories told, that it appears at times as if, under that name, the attributes of all the other goddesses were gathered up. Isis, being a personification, not of the receptive earth only, but of the feminine principle in nature wherever it was perceived, whether in the tender west that received the sun, or in tho brooding midnight sky that invited to repose, or in the cherishing soil "that drew in the warmth of the sun, and the breath of the wind, to give them forth again changed into flowers, and fruit, and corn. Isis of " the ten thousand names " the Greeks called her; and if we consider her as the embodiment of all that can be said of the feminine principle, we shall not be surprised at her many names, or at the difficulty of comprehending her nature. She was, above all else, however, the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus, which certainly points to her being, or at all events to her having been originally, a sky-goddess; but then again she is spoken of as dressed in robes of many hues, which points to the changing and parti-colored earth. Some of her attributes seem to connect her with the dark moon, especially' the fact that her most important offices are towards the dead in the under-world, whose government she is spoken of as sharing with her husband Osiris. In pictures of the funeral procession she is drawn as standing at the head of the mummied body during its passage over the river that bounds the under-world, and in that position she represents the beginning ; her younger sister Nepthys, the end, stands at the foot of the still sleeping soul; the two goddesses thus summing up, with divinity at each end, the little span of mortal life. In the judgment hall, Isis stands behind the throne of Osiris, drooping great protecting wings over him and it. This quality of protecting, of cherishing and defending, appears to be the spiritual conception worshipped under the form of the many-named goddess. Isis is constantly spoken of as the protector of her brother Osiris, and is drawn on the tombs with long drooping wings. She is also frequently represented as nursing Horus, the son who avenged his father, and in that character she wears the cow's head, the cow being sacred to Isis, as was the bull to Osiris.

The origin of the strange intimate connection between these Egyptian gods, and certain animals held to be sacred to them, and in some cases to be incarnated by them, is a very difficult question to determine. Two explanations are given by different writers, one is that the animal worship was a remnant of the religion of an inferior race who inhabited Egypt in very far back times, and who were conquered but not exterminated by emigrants from Asia, who brought a higher civilization and more spiritual religion with them, which however did not actually supersede the old, but incorporated some of its baser elements into itself. Other writers look npon the animal worship as but another form of the unending parable from nature, which, as we have seen, pervades the whole of the mythology. The animals, according to this view, being not less than the nature gods worshipped, as revelations of a divine order, manifesting itself through the many appearances of the outside world; their obedient following of the laws imposed on their natures through in�stinct making them better witnesses to the Divine Will than self-willed, disobedient man was found to be.

This is one of the problems which must be left to be determined by further researches into unwritten history, or perhaps by a fuller understanding of Egyptian symbols. That a great deal of symbolical teaching was wrapped up in their worship of animals may be gathered by the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the desert a ball of clay, full of eggs, which in due course of time changed into chrysalises and then into winged beetles, furnished them with their favorite emblem of the resurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul through the apparent death-sleep�an emblem which no temple wanted and without which no body was ever buried. Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes were not shut to the teaching of the " visible things " which in the ages of dark�ness yet spoke a message from God.

We have now gone over the most important of the Egyptian gods, connecting them with the natural appearances which appear to have inspired them, so as to give the clue to a comparison with the nature gods of the Aryans, of which we shall speak in another paper. There were of course other objects of worship, not so easily classed, among which we ought to mention Hapi, the personification of the river Nile; Sothis, the dog-star, connected with Isis, and two other of the funeral gods; Anubis, who in his nature aspect may be possibly another personification of air and wind, and who is always spoken of as the friend and guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping the new-born soul to escape from the body; alsoThmei, the goddess of Truth and Justice, who introduces the soul into the hall of judgment. The evil powers recognized among the ancient Egyptians were principally embodiments of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not appear to have had distinct conceptions of moral evil associated with them. They are, however, spoken of in the book of the dead as enemies of the soul, who endeavor to delude it and lead it out of its way on its journey across the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt the desert, but not only the sun-lit desert the Egyptians could overlook from their western hills. It included the unknown world beyond and underneath, to which they supposed the sun to go when he sank below the horizon, and where following in his track the shades trooped when they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and combats of the soul on its journey through Amenti to the judgment-hall, and its reception by the gods, is written in the most ancient and sacred of Egyptian books, the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, which has been translated into French by M. de Rong6, and into English by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in the Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen's Egypt's Place in History.

The mythologies of the other uninspired Semitic nations resemble the Egyptian in the main element of being personifi�cations of the powers of nature. The Chaldeans directed their worship towards the Heavenly bodies even more exclusively than did the ancient Egyptians. Their principal deities were arranged in triads of greater and less dignity, and all the members of these were personifications of different aspects of suu and sky. The first triad comprised Anu, the hidden sun: Father of the gods, Lord of Darkness, Ruler of a far-off city, Lord of Spirits. By these titles suggestive of some of the attributes and offices towards the dead, attributed by the Egyptians to Atum and Osiris, was the first member of their first order of Gods addressed by the Chaldaeans. Next in order came Bil, the midday sun: the Ruler, the Lord, the Source of kingly power, and the patron and image of the earthly King. His name has the same signification as Baal, and he personifies the same aspect of nature, the sun ruling in the heavens, whose worship was so widely diffused among all the people with whom the Israelites came in contact. The third member of the first triad was Hoa, who personified the rays of the sun: Lord of the abyss, Lord of the great deep, the intelligent Guide, the intelligent Fish, the Lord of the Understanding, are some of his titles, and appear to reveal a conception somewhat answering to that of Thoth. His symbol was a serpent, and he was represented with a fish's head, which connects him with the Philistine's god Dagon. The second triad comprised Sin or Urki, a moon god, worshipped at Ur, Abraham's city,�his second name Urki, means the watcher, and has the same root as the Hebrew name for angel �San, the disk of the sun, and Vul, the air. Beneath these deities in dignity, or rather perhaps in distance, came the five planets, each representing some attribute or aspect of the deity, or rather being itself a portion of deity- endowed with a special characteristic, and regarded as likely to be propitious to men from being less perfect and less remote than the greater gods. These planetary gods were called�Nebo (Mercury), the lover of light; Ishtar (Venus), the mother of the gods; Nergal (Mars), the great hero; Bel Merodach (Jupiter), the ruler, the judge; Nin (Saturn), the god of strength. To these gods the chief worship of the Assyrians was paid, and it was their majesty and strength, typifying that of the earthly king, which Assyrian architects personified in the winged man-headed bulls and lions with examples of which we are familiar. The false gods of the Canaanite nations, Moloch, Baal, Chemosh, Baal-Zebub, and Thammuz, were all of them personifications of the sun or of the sun's rays, considered under one aspect or another; the cruel gods, to whom human sacrifices were offered, representing the strong, fierce summer sun, and the gentle Thammuz being typical of the softer light of morning and of early spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of midday and midsummer, and mourned for by the earth till his return in the evening and in autumn. Ashtoreth, the horned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in groves, is the moon and also the evening star, but, like Isis, she seems to gather up in herself the worship of the feminine principle in nature. The Canaanites repre�sented their gods in the temples by symbols instead of by sculptured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in the shrine of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre) symbolized the sun and the masculine element in nature; while the feminine element was figured under the semblance of a grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes apparently a grove outside the temple and sometimes a mimic grove kept within.

There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another, and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical concep�tion of God worshipped by all the Semitic people of Asia. His name, II or El, appears to have been for Chaldasans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the nature gods were approached, ill became a concealed distant deity, too far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew, to be con�cealers, instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen people the name acquired even new significance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His children.

This slight sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites will probably strike you as very barren in incident and character; a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes indeed, through whose thin personalities the shapes of natural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus.

 

CHAPTER IX.

iETAS RELIGIONS.

 

That morning speech of Belarius (in Gymbeline) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature religion in its simplest garb :

"Stoop, boys; this gate Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you To morning's holy office: the gates of monarchs Are arched so high, that giants may get through And keep their impious tnrbans on without Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thon fair heaven ! We house i' the rock, yet use thee not so hardly As prouder livers do."

Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of dis�appointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of moun�tain life, different altogether from our life, now free alike from its cares, and temptations, and moral responsibilities. He gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays bis morning orisons. " Hail, thou fair heaven !" There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-re�proach. And in this respect�taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion�how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers. Is this the voice of natural as Opposed to inspired religion ? Not altogether, for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear�awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower�than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria ; and it will be remembered that when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, Ave took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system ; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency�if no more�towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology. But the Aryans grew up and formed themselves into nations, and developed the germs of their religion apart from external influence, and in a land which from the earliest times had belonged to them alone. Their character, their religion, their national life, were their own; and though in after times these went through dis�tinctive modifications, when the stems of nations that we know, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and the rest, grew out of the Aryan stock, they yet bore amid these changes the memory of a common ancestry. The land in which they dwelt was favorable to the growth of the imaginative faculties, and to that lightness and brightness of nature which afterwards so distinguished the many-minded Greeks, rather than to the slow, brooding character of the Eastern mind. There, down a hundred hillsides, and along a hundred valleys, trickled the rivulets whose waters were hurrying to swell the streams of the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And each hill and valley had its separate community, joined indeed by language and custom to the common stock, but yet living a separate simple life in its own home, which had, one might almost say, its individual sun and sky as well as hill and river. No doubt in such a laud innumerable local legends and beliefs sprang up, and these, though lost to us now, had their effects upon the changes which among its various branches the mythologies of the Aryans underwent; mythologies which are before all remarkable for the endless variations to which the stories of their gods are subject, the infinite rainbow-tints into which their essential thoughts are broken.

Despite these divergencies, the Aryans had a common chief deity,�the sky, the "fair heaven." This, the most abstracted and intangible of natural appearances, at the same time the most exalted and unchanging, seemed to them to speak most plainly of an "all-embracing deity. And though their minds were open to all the thousand voices of nature, and their imaginations equal to the task of giving a personality to each, yet none, not even the sun himself, imaged so well their ideal of a highest All-Father as did the over-arching heaven. The traces of this primitive belief, the Aryan people- carried with them on their wanderings. This sky-god was the Dyaus (the sky) of Indian mythology, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans, and the Zio, Tew, or Tyr of the Germans and Norsemen. For all these names are etymologically allied. Zeus (gen. Dios) and Dyaus are from the same root as are Jupiter (anciently Diupiter) and the com�pound form Dyaus-pitar (father Dyaus); and Zeo and Tew also bear traces of the same origin. Indeed it is by the reappearance of this name as the name of a god among so many different nations that we argue his having once been the god of all the Aryan people. The case is like that of our word daughter. As we find this reappearing in the Greek thugatSr, and the Sanskrit duhitar, we feel sure that the old Aryans had a name for daughter from which all these names are derived; and as we find the Sanskrit name alone has a secondary meaning, signifying " the milker," we conclude that this was the origin of the word for a daughter. Just so, Zeus and Jupiter and Zio and Dyaus show a common name for the chief Aryan god; but the last alone explains the meaning of that name, for Dyaus signifies the sky.

This sky-god then stood to the old Aryans for the notion of a supreme and common divinity. Whatever may have been the divinities reigning over local streams and woods, they acknowledged the idea of one over-ruling Providence whom they could only image to their minds as the over�spreading sky. This, we may say, was the essential feature in their religion, its chief characteristic ; whereas to the Semitic nations, the sun, the visible orb, was in every case the supreme god. The reason of this contrast does not, it seems to me, lie. only in the different parts which the sun played in the southern and more northern regions : or if it arises in the difference of the climate, it npt the less forms an important chapter in religious development. There are in the human mind two diverse tendencies in its dealings with religious ideas. Both are to be found in every religion, among every people; one might almost say in every heart. The first tendency is an impulse upwards�a desire to press the mind continually forward in an effort to idealize the deity, but by exalting or seeming to exalt Him into the highest regions of abstraction, it runs the risk of robbing Him of all fellowship with man, and man of all claims upon His sympathy and love. Then comes the other tendency, which oftentimes at one stroke brings down the deity as near as possible to the level of human beings, and leaves him at the end no more than a demi-god or exalted man. One may be called the metaphysical, the other the mythological tendency : and we shall never be able to understand the history of religions until we learn to see how these influences interpenetrate and work in every system. They show at once that a distinction must be drawn between mythology and religion. The su�preme god will not be he of whom most tales are invented, because, as these tales must appeal to human interests and relate adventures of the human sort, they will cling more naturally round the name of some inferior divinity. The very age of mythology�so far as regards the beings to whom it relates�is probably rather that of a decaying religion.

In any case, there will probably be a metaphysical and a mythological side to every system. Thus among the Egyptians, Amun, the concealed, was the metaphysical god; but their mythology centred round the names of Osiris and Horus. And just so with the Aryans, the sky was the original, most abstracted, and most metaphysical god ; the sun rose into prominence in obedience to the wish of man for a more human divinity. And if the Semitic people were more inclined towards sun-worship, the Aryans rather towards heaven-worship, the difference is consistent with the greater faculty for abstract thought which has always belonged to our race.

The two influences are perfectly well marked in Aryan mythology. The history of it represents the rivalry between the sky-gods and the gods of the sun. It is on account of his daily change that the last less fitly becomes the position of a supreme god. Born each day in the east, faint and weak he battles with the clouds of morning; radiant and strong he mounts into the midday sky, and then, having touched his highest point, he turns to quench his beams in the shadowy embrace of night. Even the Egyptians and Assyrians, in view of these vicissitudes, were driven to invent a sort of abstract sun, separated in thought from the mere visible orb.

This daily course might stand ,as an allegory of the life of man. The luminary who underwent these changing shows, however great and godlike in appearance, must have some more than common relationship with the world below ; he must be either a hero raised among the gods, or, better (for of this thought the Aryans too had their dim foreshadowing), he is an Avatar, an Incarnation of the Godhead, come down to take upon him for a while the painful life of men. This was the way the sun-gods were regarded by the Indo-European nations. Accordingly, while their deepest religious feelings belonged to the abstract god Zeus, Jupiter among the Greeks and Romans, Dyaus and later on Brahma (a pure abstraction) among the Indians, the stories of their mythology belonged to the sun-god. He is the Indra of the Hindoos, who wrestles with the black serpent, the Night, as Horus did with Typhon ; he is the Apollo of the Greeks, likewise the slayer of the serpent, the Python; or else he is Heracles (Hercules), the god-man�sometimes worshipped as a god, sometimes as a demi-god only�the great and mighty hero, the performer of innumerable labors for his fellows; or he is Thorr, the Hercules of the Norsemen, the enemy of the giants and of the great earth-serpent, which represent the dark chaotic forces of nature ; or the mild Baldur, the fairest of all the gods, the best-beloved by gods and men.

It is clear that a different character of worship will belong to each. The sacred grove would be dedicated to the myste�rious pervading presence ; the temple would be the natural home of the human-featured god; and this the more because men worshipped in forest glade or upon mountain top before they dedicated to their gods houses made with hands. Dyaus is the old, the primevally old, divinity, the " son of time " as the Greeks called him.¹ Whenever, there�fore, we trace the meeting streams of thought, the cult of the sun-god and the cult of the sky, to the latter belongs the conservative part of the national creed, his rival is the re�forming element. In the Vedic religion of India, Indra, as has been said, has vanquished the older deity ; we feel in tie Vedas that Dy&us, though often mentioned, no longer occupies a commanding place, not however without concessions on both sides. Indra could not have achieved this victory but that he partakes of both natures. He is the sky as well as the sun, more human than the unmoved watching heavens, he is a worker for man, the sender of the rain and the sunshine, the tamer of the stormwinds, and the enemy of darkness. And if one should examine in detail the different systems of the Aryan people he would, I think, have no difficulty in tracing throughout them the two influences which have been dwelt upon, and in each connecting these two influences with their sky- and sun-gods. Whatever theory may be used to account for it, the change of thought is noticeable. Man seems to awake into the world with the orison of Belarius upon his lips; he is content with the silent unchanging ab�stract god. But as he advances in the burden and heat of the day he wishes for a fellow-worker, or at least for some potency which watches his daily struggles with less of godlike sublime indifference. Hence arise his sun-gods,�the gods who toil and suffer, and even succumb and die.

It would be too long a task to try and show these varying moods among all the Aryan folk. Among most the traces are obscure, for the religions themselves have been almost lost. Even in those with which we are best acquainted, as for instance, the religions of the Greeks' and Norsemen, we must not attempt a complete or scientific exposition, but let the reader draw from a rough sketch their general character. Let us turn first to the Greek. The chief religious influences in Hellas came from Zeus and Apollo, and belonged to two separate branches of the same race who came together to form the Hellenic people. The ancestors of the Greeks had, we know, travelled from the Aryan home by a road which took them south of the Black Sea, and on to the table-land of Asia Minor. So far a comparison of names and traditions shows them advancing in a compact body. Here they separated; and after a stay of some centuries, during which a part had time to mingle with the Semitic people of the land, they pushed forward, some across the Hellespont and round that way by land through Thrace and Thessaly, spread�ing as they went down to the extremity of the peninsula; others to the western coast of Asia Minor, and theii, when through the lapse of years they had learnt their art from the Phoenician navigators who frequented all that land, onward from island to island, as over stepping-stones, across the Aegean,

Penetrating to every pleasant bay or fertile valley by the coast, but most of all to those upon the east, the new-comers mingled with or drove away the former occupants, whom they called Pelasgi, and who were in fact their brethren who had first gone round by land to Greece. These, who had advanced little in civilization, and still lived their early pas�toral life, worshipping their gods in groves or upon hillsides, these Pelasgi preserved especially their Aryan god Dyaus, whose name had now become Zeus. This is why we hear of the Pelasgic Zeus; and why Zeus' great shrines lay in the least disturbed districts of Greece proper, in the west, in the sacred groves of Dodona and Elis.

But the worship of Apollo belonged to the sailors from the Asiatic coast. He is the patron of the arts, of all that higher civilization which the Greeks had learned in contact with older nations, especially of the divine arts of music and song. He was worshipped by both divisions of the new Greek race, the Dorians and Ionians, whose personality was so great that it almost obliterated that of the older dwellers in the European peninsula. So too the worship of Apollo spread after the Dorians and Ionians throughout the land. But it began in the east, as Apollo himself was said to have sprung from the island of Delos.

As before by a comparison of words, so now in mythology by a comparison of legends, we form our notion of the remote�ness of the time at which these stories were first passed current. Not only, for instance, do we see that Indra and Apollo resemble each other in character, but we have proof that nature-myths�stories really narrating some process of nature �were familiar alike to Greeks and Indians. The Vedas, the sacred book from which we gather our knowledge of ancient Hindoo religion, do not relate their stories of the gods in the same way, or with the same clearness and elaboration, as do the Greek poets. They are collections of hymns, prayers in verse, addressed to their gods themselves, and what they relate is told more by reference and implication than directly. But even with this difference, we have no difficulty in signalizing some of the adventures of Indra as almost identical with those of the son of Leto. Let one suffice. The pastoral life of the Aryans is reflected in their mythology, and thus it is that in the Yedas almost all the varied phenomena of nature are in their turn compared to cattle. Indra is often spoken of as a bull; still more commonly are the clouds the cows of Indra, and their milk the rain. More than one of the songs of the Rig-Veda allude to a time when the wicked Pawis (beings of fog or mist') stole away the cows from the fields of Indra and hid them away in a cave. They obscured their footprints by tying up their feet or by making them drag bushwood behind them. But Indra sent his dog Sarama (the dawn or breath of dawn), and she found out where the cattle were hidden. But (according to one story) the Panis overcame her honesty and gave her a cup of milk to drink, so that she came back to Indra and denied having seen the cows. But Indra discovered the deception, and came with his strong spear and conquered the Panis, and recovered what had been stolen.

Now turn to the Greek myth. The story here is cast in a different key.

Te boves olim nisi reddidisses Per dolum amotas, puerum minaoi Voce dum terret, viduus pharetra Risit Apollo.

Hermes (Mercury) is here the thief. He steals the cattle of Apollo feeding upon mount Pieria, and conceals his theft much as the Panis had done. Apollo discovers what has been done, and complains to Zeus. But Hermes is a god, and no punish�ment befalls him like that which was allotted to the Pawis ; he charms Apollo by the sound of his lyre, and is forgiven, and allowed to retain his booty. Still, all the essentials of the story are here ; and the story in either case relates the same nature-myth. The clouds which in the Indian tale are stolen

A word allied to oar fen.

by the damp vapors of morning', are in the Greek legend filched away by the morning breeze ; for this is the nature of Hermes. And that some such power as the wind had been known to the Indians as accomplice in the work, is shown by the complicity of Sarama in one version of the tale. For Sarama likewise means the morning breeze ; and, in fact, Sarama and Hermes are derived from the same root, and are almost identical in character. Both mean in their general nature the wind ; in their special appearances they stand now for the morning, now for the evening breeze, or even for the morning and evening themselves.

The next most important deity as regards the whole Greek race is Heracles. It is a great mistake to regard him, as our mythology books often lead us to do, as a demi-god or hero only. Originally, and among a portion of the Greek race, he was one of the mightiest gods ; but at last, perhaps because his adventures became in later tradition rather preposterous and undignified, he sank to be a demi-god, or immortalized man. The story of Heracles' life and labors is a pure but most elaborate sun_:myth. From his birth, where he strangles the serpents in his cradle�the serpents of darkness, like the Python which Apollo slew�through his Herculean labors to his death, we watch the labors of the sun through the mists and clouds of heaven to its ruddy setting; and these stories are so like to others which are told of the northern Heracles, Thorr, that we caunot refuse to believe that they were known in the main in days before there were either Greek-speaking Greeks or Teutons. The closing scene of his life speaks the most eloquently of its natural origin. Returning home in victory�his last victory�to Trachis, Deianira sends to him there the fatal white robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. No sooner has he put it on than his death-agony begins. In the madness of his pain he dashes his companion, Lichas, against'the rocks ; he tears at the burning robe, and with it brings away the flesh from his limbs. Then seeing that all is over, he becomes more calm. He gives his last commands to his son, Hyllus, and orders his funeral pile to be prepared upon mount GEta, as the sun, after its last fatal battle with the clouds of sunset, sinks down calmly into the sea. Then as, after it has gone, the sky lights up aglow with color, so does the funeral pyre of Heracles seud out its light over the ^Egean, from its western shore.

Another deity who was distinctly of Aryan origin was Demeter (Ceres), a name which is, in fact, none other than Gemeter, " mother earth." The association of ideas which, opposite to the masculine godhead the sun or sky, placed the fruitful all-nourishing earth, is so natural as to find a place in almost every system: we have seen how they formed a part of the Egyptian and Assyrian mythologies. There is evidence enough to show that each branch of the Aryan folk carried away along with their sky- and sun-worship this earth-worship also. Tellus was one of the divinities of the old Roman pantheon, though her worship gave place in' later times to that of Cybele and Ceres: Frigg, the wife of Odin, filled the same position among the Teutons. But among none of the different branches was the great nature-myth which always gathers round the earth-goddess, woven into a more pathetic story than by the Greeks. The story is that of the winter death or sleep of earth, or of all that makes earth beautiful and glad. And it was thus the Greeks told that world-old legend. Persephone (Proserpine) is the green earth, or the green verdure which may be thought the daughter of earth and sky. She is, indeed, almost the reduplication of Dimeter herself; and in art it is not always easy to distin�guish a representation as of one or the other. At spring-time she, a maiden, with her maidens, is wandering careless in the Elysian fields, plucking the flowers of spring, " crocuses and roses and fair violets," ¹ when in a moment all is changed. Hades, regent of Hell, rises in his black-horsed golden chariot; unheeding her cries, he carries her off to share his infernal throne and rule in the kingdoms of the dead. In other words, the awful shadow of death falls across the path of youth and spring, and Hades appears to proclaim the fateful truth that all spring-time, all youth and verdure, are alike with hoary age candidates for service in his Shadowy Kingdom. The sudden contrast between spring flowers and maidenhood and death gives a dramatic intensity to the scene and represents the quiet course of decay in one tremendous moment. To lengthen out the picture and show the slow sorrow of earth robbed of its spring and summer, Demeter is portrayed wandering from land to land in bootless search of her lost daughter. We know how deep a significance this story had in the religious thought of Greece; how the repre�sentation of it composed the chief feature of the Eleusinian mysteries, and how these and other mysteries probably enshrined the intenser, more hidden feelings of religion, and continued to do so when mythology had lost its hold upon the popular mind. It is, indeed, a new-antique story, patent to all and fraught for all with solemnest meaning. So that this myth of the death of Proserpine has lived on in a thousand forms through all the Aryan systems.

Besides these gods, the Greeks had some whose origin was, in part at least, Semitic. Almost the chief of these was the Phoenician moon-goddess Astarte, out of whom grew the Aphrodite (Venus) of the Greeks, and in great measure Artemis (Diana) and Athene" (Minerva) as well. The more sensuous the character in which Aphrodite appears, the more does she show her Asiatic birth; and this was why the Greeks, when regarding her especially as the goddess of love, called her Cypris or Cythersea, after Cyprus and Cythera which had been in ancient days stations for the Phoenician traders, and where they had first made acquaintance with the Greeks. She was the favorite goddess of these mariners, as, indeed, a moon-goddess well might be; and they gave her her most corrupt and licentious aspect. For she had not this character even among all the Phoenicians; but oftentimes appears as a huntress, more like Artemis, or armed as a goddess of battle, like AthenS. Doubtless, however, goddesses closely allied to Aphrodite or Artemis, divinities of productive nature and divinities of the moon, belonged to the other branches of the Indo-European family. The idea of these divinities was a common property; the exact being in whom these ideas found expression varied with each race.

If we travel from Hellas and from India to the cold north the same characteristic features reappear. In the Teutonic religions, as we know them,¹ Odin has taken the place of the old Aryan sky-god, Dyaus. This last did, indeed, linger on in the Zio or Tyr of these systems; but he had sunk from the position of a chief divinity. The ehange, however, is not great. The god chosen to fill his place resembles him as nearly as possible in character. Odin or "\Yuotan, whose name means " to move violently," "to rush," was originally a god of the wind rather than of the atmosphere of heaven; but along with this more confined part of his character, he bears almost all the attributes of the exalted sky-god, the Dyaus or Zeus. Only he adds to these some parts peculiar to a god of wind; and we can easily understand how, as these Aryan people journeyed northwards, their wind-god grew in magnitude and power.

It was Odin who lashed into fury their stormy seas, and kept the impatient vikings (fjord-men) forced prisoners in their sheltered bays. He it was who rushed through their mountain forests, making the ancient pine-tops bend to him as he hurried on; and men sitting at home over their winter fires and listening to his howl told one another how he was hastening to some distant battle-field, there to direct the issue, and to choose from among the fallen such heroes as were worthy to accompany him to Valhalla, the Hall of Bliss.Long after the worship of Christ had overturned that of the .Jisir,' this, the most familiar and popular aspect of Odin's nature, lived on in the thoughts of men. In the Middle Ages the wind reappears in the legend of the Phantom Army, a strange apparition of two hosts of men seen to join battle in mid-air. The peasant of the Jura or the Alps could tell how, when alone upon the mountain-side, he had beheld the awful vision. Sometimes all the details of the. fight were visible, but as though the combatants were riding in the air; sometimes the sounds of battle only came from the empty space above, till at the end a shower of blood gave the fearful witness a proof that he was not the dupe of his imagination only. In other places, especially, for instance, in the Harz mountains, the Phantom Army-gave place to the Wild Huntsman�our Heme the Hunter. In the Harz and in other places in Germany he was called Hackelbiirend or Hackelberg; and the story went how he had been chief huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, but for impiety or for some dreadful oath, like that which had brought vengeance on the famous Van der Decken, had been condemned to hunt for ever through the clouds�for ever, that is, until the Day of Judgment.¹ All the year through he pursues his way alone, and the peasants hear his holloa, mingled with the baying of his two dogs.But for twelve nights�between Christmas and Twelfth night�he hunts on the earth; and if any door is left open during the night, and one of the two hounds runs in, he will bring mis�fortune upon that house.

Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears as the heaven-god�all-embracing�the father of gods and men, like Zeus. " All-father Odin " he is called, and his seat is on Air-throne; there every day he ascended and looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth's border. And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness upon the earth, that he set to' rights; and he kept watch against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last�the race of giants�he could not utterly subdue and exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods them�selves�of which we cannot tell more now.

In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to that of the "wide-seeing" Zeus. "The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all," says one poet; or again, as another says, " Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, and that which is over all."

Behind Odin stands Tyr�of whom we have already spoken �and Thorr and Baldur, who are two different embodiments of the sun. The former corresponds in character very closely with Heracles. He is the mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agriculture,¹ and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which represents not only cold and darkness, but the barren, rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, Thorr is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, " faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants)," as the Eddas often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs three labors, which may be paralleled from the labors of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking from a horn; this is the sun " sucking up the clouds " from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and Peneus, which Heracles per�forms. Then he tries to lift (as he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the under-world. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old woman, and is worsted; but in reality he has been wrestling with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off the victor. So we read in Homer that Heracles once wounded Hades himself, and " brought grief into the land of shades," and in Euripides' beautiful play, Alcestis, we see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with Thanatos, Death himself. In these labors the Norse hero, though striving manfully, fails ; but the Greek is always victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the character of the two creeds.

Baldur the Beautiful�the fair, mild Baldur�represents the sun more truly than Thorr does: the sun in his gentle aspect, as he would naturally appear to a Norseman. His house is Breidablik, " Wide-glance," that is to say, the bright upper air, the sun's home. He is like the son of Leto seen in his benignant aspect, the best beloved among gods, the brightener of their war-like life, beloved, too, by all things on earth, living and inanimate, and lamented as only the sun could be�the chief nourisher at life's feast. For, when Baldur died, everything in heaven and earth, " both all living things and trees and stones and all metals," wept to bring him back again, " as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one." A modern poet has very happily expressed the character of Baldur, the sun-god, the great quickener of life upon earth. Baldur is supposed to leave heaven to tread the ways of men, and his coming is the signal for the new birth, as of spring�time, in the sleeping world.

" There is some divine trouble

On earth and in air;

Trees tremble, brooks bubble,

Ants loosen the sod,

Warm footsteps awaken

Whatever is fair,

Sweet dewdrops are shaken

To quicken each clod.

The wild rainbows o' er him

Are melted and fade.

The light runs before him

Through meadow and glade.

Green branches close round him,

Their leaves whisper clear�

He is ours, we have found him,

Bright Baldur is here."

The earth-mother of the Teutons was Frigg, the wife of Odin; but perhaps when Frigg's natural character was forgot�ten, Hertha (Earth) became separated into another personage. "Odin and Frigg," says the Edda, "divide the slain;" and this means that the sky-god received the breath, the earth-goddess the body. But on the whole she plays an insignificant part in our late form of Teuton mythology. Closely related to her, as Persephone is related to Demeter, with a name formed out of hers, stands Freyja, the goddess of spring, and beauty, and love; for the northern goddess of love might better accord with the innocence of spring than the Phoenician Aphrodite. Freyja has a brother Freyr, who but reduplicated her name and character, for he too is a god of spring. Very beautiful is the myth which reverses the sad story of Persephone (and Baldur) and tells of the barren earth wooed by the returning spring. Freyr one day mounted the seat of Odin which was called air-throne, and whence a god might look over all the ways of earth. And looking out into giant land far in the north, he saw a light flash forth as the aurora lights up the wintry sky.And looking again, he saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful had just opened her father's door, and that this was her beauty which shone out over the snow. Then Freyr left the air-throne and determined to send to the fair one and woo her to be his wife. Her name was Gerda.Freyr sent his messenger Skirnir to carry his suit to Gerda; and he told her how great Freyr was among the gods, how noble and happy a place was Asgard, the home of the gods. For all Skirnir's pleading Gerda would give no ear to his suit. But Freyr had given his magic sword (the sun's rays) to Skirnir; and at last the ambassador, tired of pleading, drew that and threatened to take the life of Gerda unless she granted Freyr his wish. So she consented to meet him nine nights hence in the wood of Barri. The nine nights typify the nine winter months of the northern year; and the name of the wood, Barri, means "the green"; the beginnings of spring in the wood being happily imaged as the meeting of the fresh and barren earth.

All the elements of nature were personified by the spirit of Aryan poetry, and it would be a hopeless task�wearisome and useless to the reader�to give a mere category of the nature gods in each system. Those which had most influence upon their religious thought were they who have been men�tioned, the gods of the sky and sun and mother earth. The other elemental divinities were (as a rule) more strictly bound within the circle of their own dominions. It is curious to trace the difference between these strictly polytheistic deities-coequal in their several spheres�and those others who arose in obedience to a wider ideal of a godhead. Thus the Indians had a strictly elemental heaven or sky, as well as their god Dyaus. Him they called Varuwa, a word which corresponds etymologically to the Greek Ouranos, the heaven. In the later Indian mythology Vanma came to stand, not for the sky, but for the wide expanse of ocean, and so corresponds to the Greek Poseidon, the Latin Neptune, and the Norse CEgir. All these were the gods of the sea and of all waters. The wind, as we saw, combined in the person of Odin with the character of a highest god; but in the Greek the part was played by an inferior divinity, Hermes. In India there is no actual wind-god ; but the character is divided among a plurality of minor divinities, the Maruts. And in revenge a being of the first importance in the Indian system receives scarcely any notice in the others. This is Agni, the god of fire, who corresponds to Hephaestus and Vulcan; and in the north is not a god at all, but an evil being called Loki. This is enough to show that the worship of Agni rose into fervor after the separation of the Aryan folk.

We postpone to the next chapter the mention of the gods of the under-world.

The religions of which we have been giving this slight sketch have been what we may call " natural " religions, that is to say, the thoughts about God and the Unseen world which without help of any special vision seem to spring up simultaneously in the minds of the different Aryan peoples. But one among the Aryan religions still in pre-historic times broke off abruptly from its relation with the others, and, under a teacher whom we may fairly call god-taught, in beauty and moral purity passed far beyond the rest.

This was the Zoroastrian, the faith of the Iranian (ancient Persian) branch, a religion which holds a pre-eminence among all the religions of antiquity, excepting alone that of the Hebrews. And that there is no exaggeration in such a claim is sufficiently witnessed by the inspired writings themselves, in which the Persian kings are frequently spoken of as if they as much as the Hebrews were worshippers of Jehovah. " Cyrus the servant of God," " The Lord said unto my lord (Cyrus)," are constantly recurring expressions in Isaiah. In some respects this Zoroastrianism seems to stand in violent opposition to the Aryan religion; in other lights it appears as merely a much higher development of it. In either case, we may feel sure that the older system was before the coining of the " gold bright" ¹ reformer, essentially a polytheism with only some yearnings towards monotheism, and that Zoroaster settled it upon a firmly monotheistic basis. This very fact leaves us little to say about the Iranian system considered strictly as a religion. For when once nations have risen to the height of a monotheism there can be little essential difference in their beliefs; such difference as there is will be in the conception they have of the character of their gods, whether it be a high, a relatively high, or relatively low one; and this again is more perhaps a question of moral develop�ment than of religion. Their one god, since he made all things and rules all things, cannot partake of the exclusive nature of any natural phenomenon; he cannot be a god of wind or water, of sun or sky. The Zoroastrian creed did afterwards introduce (then for the first time in the. world's history) a very important element of belief, namely, of the distinct origin, and almost if not quite equal powers, of the good and evil principles. But this was later than the time of Zarathustra.

The name which Zarathustra taught the people to give to the one God was unconnected with Aryan nature-names, Dyaus or Varuna, or Indra. He simply called him the "Great Spirit," or, in theZend, Ahura-mazda; in later Persian, Hormuzd or Ormuzd. He is the all-perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, all-beautiful. He is the creator of all things. And�still nearer to our Christian belief�before the creation of the world, by means whereof the world itself was made, existed the Word. Some trace of this same doctrine of the pre�existing Word (Hanover, in the Zoroastrian religion ) is to be found in the Vcdas, where he is called Vaeh. It would be here impossible to enter into an examination of the question how far these early religions seem to shadow forth the mystical doctrine of the Logos. The evil principle opposed to Ormuzd is Agra-Mainyus (Ahrimanes), but in the true doctrine he is by no means the equal of God, no more so than is Satan. The successive corruption of pure Zoroastrianism after the time of its founder is marked by a constant exag�geration of the power of the evil principle (suggested perhaps by intercourse with deity-worshipping nations of a lower type) until Ahrimanes becomes the rival of Ormuzd, co-equal and co-eternal with him.

Such is the simple creed of the Persians, accompanied of course by rites and ceremonies, part invented by the reformer, part inherited from the common Aryan parentage. It is well known that the Persians built no temples, but worshipped Ormuzd chiefly upon the mountain-tops; that they paid great respect to all the elements�that is to air, water, and fire, the latter most of all�a belief which they shared with their Indian brethren, but stopped far short of worshipping any. That they held very strongly the separate idea of the soul, so that when once a body had lost its life, they considered it to be a thing wholly corrupt and evil; a doctrine which carried in the germ that of the inherent evil of matter, as the philo�sophical reader will discern.

It remains to say something of their religious books. The Zend Avesta was supposed to comprise the teaching of Zoroaster, and was believed to have been written by him. Only one complete book has been preserved�it is called the Vendiddd. The ZswcHanguage in which the Avesta is written is the oldest known form of Persian, older than that in use at the time of Darius the Great; but this is no proof that it dates back to the days of Zarathustra. Part of it is in prose and part in verse, and as in every literature .we find that the fragments of verse are they which, survive the Conquest, it has been conjectured that the songs of the Zend Avesta (Gatbas they are called) may even have been written by the great reformer himself.

 

CHAPTER X.

the other world.

 

If the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man's own ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have seen that the Egyptians did so: how they watched the course of the day-star, and, seeing him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many trials and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay between. The Aryans dwelt, as we know, upon the slopes of the Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath; and, if the conjecture be reasonable that a great part of the land now a sandy desert was then filled by an inland sea,¹ many of them must have dwelt upon its borders and seen the sun plunge in its wave each evening. Then or afterwards they saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very thought of Milton:�

"Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, For Lyeidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs bis drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their souls would have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise which lay beyond in the " home of the sun."

The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is all but universal; for this reason was food and drink placed with the corpse in the tombs of the stone age: and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, which in its wonderful " Book of the Dead " gives the oldest (next to the stone age remains) and one of the completest accounts of primitive belief, expresses both these ideas very clearly; and to lengthen out the soul's journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and give inci�dent where all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As the body was carried across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance towards the sun, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the " Palace of the Two Truths," the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the deity.

It is clear that in all this we have a nucleus of world-belief touching the soul's future. Yet along with this there is another tendency to view the dead as being still present under the mound which conceals his remains, and in obedience to this feeling the old stone age men scattered "shards, flints, and pebbles," before the mouth of the grave. Such a theory would more naturally incline to view the home of the dead as being in or beneath the earth, while the other view would look for it as lying in the west with the setting sun. So, far as we know, the first was the prevailing feeling among the Semitic people. The old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speak of going down into the grave,¹ a place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode. And lastly, a third element�if not universal, common certainly to the. Aryan races�will be the conception of the soul separating from the body altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these elements are found to exist and co-exist in creeds untaught by revelation:

and the force of the component parts determines the color of their doctrine about the other world.

Among all the Aryan people the Greeks seem to have turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave, and though the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and adorned their tombs in cinery urns with wreaths of flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god Thanatos has ever been pictured by Greek art. And from what they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded it chiefly from its merely nega�tive side, in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds too with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-ides, the unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in Homer, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. And the under-world pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in life. To " wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams," is henceforward their occupation.

Not that the Greeks had no idea of another world of the more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations ; only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun's home, just after the pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their islands of the west, where, accord�ing to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been trans�ported when he fled from the power of his brother Minos. Only, observe, there is this difference between such Elvsia and the Egyptian house of Osiris�the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former are separated by the ocean from the abode of men. There then are the heavens of the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades�or later on the realm Hades�might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven-picture.

The Caspian Sea�or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea which lay before them�would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world. The region beyond its borders would be a twilight land like the land of Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians: and still farther away would lie the bright region of the sun's proper home. And these ideas would be both literal�cosmological conceptions, as we should call them�and figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, " the valley of the shadow of death," might be used for the Apap land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of a descending to the land of shades, for the two ideas of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmo�logical conception�or let us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory�the encircling river Oceanus, with the dim Cim�merian land beyond ; and we have the Elysian fields and the islands of the west for the most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of death�Styx and Lethe�and is placed in the region of death ; even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change.

The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. " On the fearful road to Yama's door," says a hymn, " is the terrible stream Yaitarawi, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow." This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman.

The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evil-doers than Charon and Cerberus.

" A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of."

On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dismissal

The names of these two dogs are interesting. They are the sons of that Sarama whom we have already seen sent by Indra to recover the lost cattle, whose name, too, signified the breeze of morning. Her two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the god of the under-world�as Sarama is with Indra the sun-god�might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Sarama is the morning. They are so ; and by their name of Sarameyas, are even more closely related to Hermes than Sarama was.¹ We now know why to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to the realm of Hades� or at least we partly know; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their individual names were Cerbura the spotted, and Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.

Death and sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find the Sarameyas, or rather a god Sarameyas, addressed as the god of sleep, the protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.

"Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who takest all

shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend. Bay at the robber, Sarameyas, bay at the thief ; why bayest thou at

the singer of Indra, why art tbou angry with me, sleep Sarameyas ? The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father

sleeps, the whole clan sleeps, sleep thou, Sarameyas.

Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these we bring to slumber."

How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life ! In their names, again, of " black " and " spotted," it is very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of night, black or starry.

And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sarameyas, bears this meaning in its con�struction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, "the proper time for dying," must have been originally the wind. And in this we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is in its origi�nal and literal meaning the breath�" the spirit does but mean the breath." What more natural therefore than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god. This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to their charge as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the con�trary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of the body in another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pic�tures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul ? The more external causes of this progress it is worthwhile briefly to trace.

The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men's minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted more than any other to this form of interment. Baldur, the northern sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the death of Heracles typifies the double significance of the sun's westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. ^^rhen therefore this fire burial was thoroughly established in custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely upon their helief that the body continued in an after life, the thought of the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In place of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of this vital power, the smoke of the funeral pyre may typify the ascend�ing soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (II. xxiiL) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which seem to have become common to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish anything more vivid and impressive. The fat oxen and sheep are slain before the pyre, and with the fat from their bodies and with honey the corpse is liberally anointed. Then twelve captives are sacrificed to the manes of the hero; they and his twelve favorite dogs are burnt with him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the anointing of the corpse with fat. It was necessary for the peace of the shade that his body should be thoroughly burned; for the funeral cere�mony was looked upon as the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the ghost still lingered upon earth unable to cross the Stygian stream. So afterwards, when the pile will not-burn, Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and pours libations to them that they come and consummate the funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend and watering the ground with libations from a golden cup. Toward morn�ing the flame sinks down; and then the two winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, return homeward across the Thracian sea.

All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form of interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in Europe is, as distinguished from that of the stony, a corpse-burning age, is one of the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were of the Aryan family.The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate it�a fact which might seem strange did we not know how much Zoroas-trianism was governed by a spirit of opposition to the older faith.Among the Norsemen about the time of the introduc�tion of Christianity into Scandinavia, Burn? or Bury ? became a test-question, and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.

In the northern religion too, therefore, we have the same leading ideas which we have signalized in the Indian or Grecian systems. Especially does that notion of the breath of the body, or the smoke of the funeral pyre representing the soul of the hero and carried upward under care of the wind, come prominently forward. This might be expected because, it will be remembered, the wind in the northern mythology is not, as with the Indians, a servant of Yama only, or as with the Greeks a lesser divinity, but the first of all the gods. To Odin is assigned the task of collecting the souls of heroes who had fallen in battle; and there are few myths more poetical than that which pictures him riding to battle fields to execute his mission. He is accompanied by his Yalkyriur, "the choosers," a sort of Amazonian houris, half human, half godlike, who ride through the air in the form of swans; wherefore they�who are originally perhaps the clouds�are often called in the Eddas, Odin's swan maidens. It has been said that this myth lived on in after-ages in the form of the Phantom, Army and Heme the Hunter : and the essential part of it, the myth of the soul carried away by the wind, lived on more obscurely in a hundred other tales, some of which we may glance at in our next chapter upon Mythol�ogy. But while this idea of the mounting soul is often clearly expressed�as for instance where in Beowulf in the last scene, the hero is burnt hy the sea-shore, it is said of him that he wand to wolcum, " curled to the clouds," imaging well the curling smoke of the pyre�there lingered on throughout other ideas of the death home, a subterraneous land (Helhcim, Hel's home) ruled over by the goddess Hel,with its infernal Styx-like stream, and the bridge of Indian mythology transferred to the lower world. And so much were the three distinct ideas interwoven, that in the myth of Baldur each one may be traced. For here the sun-god, who is the very origin and prototype of the two more exalted elements of the creed of the heavenward journey,has himself to stoop downward to the gates of HeL If this legend sanctified for the heathens the practice of fire burial, they had certainly so much excuse for their obstinate adherence to the older custom, as one of the most beautiful myths ever told might plead for them. "We may look upon it in two aspects�first as an image of the setting sun, next as an expression of men's thoughts concerning death, and the course of the soul to its future home. If in this latter respect the story seems to mix up two different myths concerning the other world, we need not be surprised at that.

Baldur dies, as the sun dies each day, and as the summer dies into winter. He falls, struck by a dart from the hand of his blind brother Hodr (the darkness), and the shadow of death appears for the first time in the homes of Asgard. At first the gods knew not what to make of it, " they were struck dumb -with horror," says the Edda;¹ but seeing that he is really dead, they prepare his funeral pyre. They took his ship Hringhorn, (Ringhorn, the disk of the sun), and on it set a pile of wood, with Baldur's horse and his armor, and all that he valued most, to which each god added' some worthy gift. And when Nanna, the wife of Baldur, saw the preparations, her heart broke with grief, and she too was laid upon the pile. Then they set fire to the ship, which sailed out burning into the sea.

But Baldur himself has to go to Helheim, the dark abode beneath the earth, where reigns Hel,the goddess of the dead. Then Odin sends his messenger, Hermodr, to the goddess, to pray her to let Baldur return ouce more to earth. For nine days and nine nights Hermodr rode through dark glens, so dark, that he could not discern anything until he came to the river Gjoll ("the sounding"�notice that here the Stygian reappears), over which he rode by Gjoll's bridge, which was pleasant with bright gold. A maiden sat there keeping the bridge ; she inquired of him his name and lineage�for, said she, "Yestereve five bands of dead men rid over the bridge, yet they did not shake it so much as thou hast done. But thou hast not death's hue upon thee ; why then ridest thou here on the way to Hel ? "

"I ride to Hel," answered Hermodr, "to seek Baldur. Hast thou perchance seen him pass this way ? "

"Baldur," answered she, " hath ridden over Gjoll's bridge. But yonder, northward, lies the road to Hel."

Hermodr then rode into the palace, where he found his brother Baldur filling the highest place in the hall, and in his company he passed the night. The next morning he besought Hel, that she would let Baldur ride home with him, assuring her how great the grief was among the gods.

Hel answered, " It shall now be proved whether Baldur be so much loved as thou sayest. If, therefore, all things both living and lifeless weep for him, then shall he return.

But if one thing speak agamsthim or refuse to weep, he shall be kept in Helheim."

And when Hermodr had delivered this answer, the gods sent off messengers throughout the whole world, to tell every�thing to weep, in order that Baldur might be delivered out of Helheim. All things freely complied with this request, both men and every other living thing, and earths, and stones, and trees, and metals, just as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one. As the messengers were returning, and deemed that their mission had been successful, they found an old hag, named Thokk,sitting in a cavern, and her they begged to weep Baldur out of Helheim. But she said :�

" Thokk will wail Nought quick or dead

With dry eyes For carl's son care L

Baldur's bale-fire. Let Hel hold her own."

So Baldur remained in Helheim. Such was the sad con�clusion of the myth of which the memory is kept up even in these days. For in Norway and Sweden�nay, in some parts of Scotland, the bale-fires celebrating the bale or death of the sun-god are lighted on the day when the sun passes the highest point in the ecliptic. Baldur will not, said tradition, remain forever in Helheim. A day will come, the twilight of the gods, when the gods themselves will be destroyed in a final victorious contest with the evil powers. And then, when a new earth has arisen from the deluge which destroys the old, Baldur, the god of Peace, will come from Death's home to rule over this regenerate world. A sublime myth� if indeed it can be called a myth.

" Swiftly walk over the western cave, Spirit of Night,

Out of thy misty eastern cave."

 

CHAPTER XI.

mythologies ahd folk tales.

 

If we found it difficult to reduce to a consistent unity the religious ideas of the Aryan races, what hope have we to find any thread through the labyrinth of their unbridled imagination in dealing with more fanciful subjects ? The world is all before them where to choose, nature, in her multi�tudinous works and ever-changing shows, is at hand to give breath to the faculty of myth-making, and lay the foundation of all the stories which have ever been told. The two ele�ments concurrent to the manufacture of mythologies are the varying phenomena in nature, and that which is Called the anthropomorphic (personifying) faculty in man. Not, in�deed, that all m\-ths represent natural appearances, some may well enough relate events, human adventures; but the gods themselves being in almost every instance the personi�fications of phenomena or powers of nature, the myths of widest extension were necessarily occupied with these. Religion being the greatest concern of man, the myths which allied themselves most closely to his religious ideas would be those which maintained the longest life and most universal acceptance. In reviewing some of the Aryan myths �in a hasty and general review as it must needs be�the preceding chapter will serve as a guide to the myths most closely connected with religious notions, which have a chief claim upon our attention. Indeed, conversely, it was the fact that so many myths cling around certain natural phenomena which allowed us, with proper reservation, to point these out as the phenomena which held the most intimate place in men's minds and hearts. With proper reservations, because the highest abstracted god does not lend himself to the myth-making faculty. He stands apart from the polytheistic cycle�below him the nature-gods who are also the heroes of the mythologies.

With a backward glance, then, to what has been already written, we may expect the chief myth systems to divide them�selves under certain classes corresponding with the god�-or natural phenomenon�who is their concern. We may expect to find myths relating especially to the labors of the sun, like those of Heracles and Thorr, or to the wind, like that of Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo, or to the earth sleeping in the embrace of winter, or sorrowing for the loss of her greenery, or joying again in her recovered life. And again we may look to find myths more intimately concerned with death, and with the looked-for future of the souL These will mingle like mingling streams, but we shall often be able to trace their origin.

The diversity of the natural phenomena which give them rise will not in any way hinder the myths from reproducing the human elements which have, since the world began, held their pre-eminence in romance and history. There will be love stories, stories of battle and victory, of magic and strange disguises, of suddenly acquired treasure, and, most attractive of all to the popular mind, stories of princes and princesses whose princedom is hidden under a servile station or beggar's gaber�dine, and of heroes who allow their heroism to rust for a while in strange inaction, that "Imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagions clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may he more wondered at."

Not necessarily because such heroes were the sun, but rather that the tales, appealing so correctly to the common sy�pathies of human nature, attach themselves pre-eminently to the great natural hero, the sun-god.

Yet, to begin with the sun-god, his love stories relate most commonly the pursuit of the dawn, a woman, by the god of day. She flies at his approach; or if the two are married in early morning, when the day advances, the dawn dies or the sun leaves her to pursue his allotted journey. We read how Apollo pursued Daphne:, while she still fled from him, and at last, praying to the gods, was changed into a laurel, which ever afterwards remained sacred to the son of Let6. There is nothing new in the story; it might be related of any hero. 1 et, as we find Greek art so often busy with it, we might guess that it had obtained for some reason a hold more than commonly firm upon the popular imagination. And when we turn from the Greek to the Sanskrit we are able to unravel the myth and show it, so far as the names are concerned, peculiar to the sun-god. Daphne is the Sanskrit Dahana, that is to say, the Dawn.

A tenderer love story is that which speaks of the sun and the dawn as united at the opening of the day, but of the separation which follows when the sun reveals himself in his true splendor. The parting, however, will not be eternal, for the sun in the evening shall sink into the arms of the west, as in the morning he left those of the east�all the physical appearances at sundown will correspond with those of the dawn�so in poetical language he will be said to return to his love again at the evening of life. Well according with its natural origin and native attractiveness, we find this story repeated almost identically as regards its chief incidents by all the branches of the Aryan family. For an Indian version of it the reader may consult the story of Urvasi and Pururavas told by Mr. Max Miiller from one of the Vedas, Urvasi is a fairy who falls in love with Pururavas, a mortal, and consents to become his wife, on condition that she should never see him without his royal garment on, "for this is the manner of women." For a while they lived together happily; but the Gandhavas, the fairy beings to whom Urvasi belonged, were jealous of her love for a mortal, and they laid a plot to separate them. " Now there was a ewe with two lambs tied to the couch of Urvasi and Pururavas, and the fairies stole one of them, so that Urvasi upbraided her husband and said, 'They steal my darlings as though I lived in a land where there is no hero, and no man.' And Pururavas said, 'How can that be a land without heroes or men where I am,' and naked he sprang up. Then the Gandhavas sent a flash of lightning, �and Urvasi saw her husband naked as by daylight. Then she vanished. 'I come back,' she said; and went."

Cupid loves Psyche as Pururavas Urvasi, but here the story is so far changed that the woman breaks the condition laid upon their union. Not this time by accident, but from the evil counselling of her two sisters, Psyche disobeys her husband. They have long been married, but she has never seen his face; and doubts begin to arise lest some horrid monster, and not a god, may be the sharer of her couch. So she takes the lamp, and when she deems her husband is fast locked in sleep, gazes upon the face of the god of love.

" But as she tnmed at last To quench the lamp, there happed a little thing That quenched her new delight, for flickering. The treacherous flame cast on his shoulder fair A burning drop; he woke, and seeing her there, The meaning of that sad sight knew full well; Nor was there need the piteous tale to tell."

It may be said that we have here wandered far from the sun. Cupid or Eros is in no sense a sun-god; nor has Psyche any proved connection with Ushas, the Dawn. This is true; once a sun-myth does not imply always a sun-myth. So much the contrary, that it is part of our business to show how stories, first appropriated to Olympus or Asgard, may descend to take their place among the commonest collection of nursery tales. It is the case with this myth of the Dawn, The reader's acquaintance with nursery literature has probably already auticipated the kinship to be claimed by one of the most familiar childish legends. But as one more link to rivet the bond of union between Urvasi and Pururavas and JSeaidy and the Peast, let us look at a story of Swedish origin called Prince Halt under the JEarth.

" There was once, very very long ago, a king who had three daughters, all exquisitely fair, and much more amiable than other maidens, so that their .like was not to be found far or near. But the youngest princess excelled her sisters, not only in beauty, but in goodness of heart and kind�ness of disposition. She was consequently greatly beloved by all, and the king himself was more fondly attached to her than to either of his other daughters.

" It happened one autumn that there was a fair in a town not far from the king's residence, and the king himself resolved on going to it with his attendants. When on the eve of departure he asked his three daughters what they would like for fairings, it being his constant custom to make them some present on his return home. The two elder princesses began instantly to enumerate precious things of curious kinds; one would have this, the other that; but the youngest daughter asked for nothing. At this the king was surprised, and asked her whether she would not like some ornament or other; but she answered that she had plenty of gold and jewels. When the king, however, would not desist from urging her, she at length said, 'There is one thing which I would gladly have, if only I might venture to ask it of my father.' ' What may that be ? ' inquired the king, ' say what it is, and if it bo in my power you shall have it.' ' It is this,' replied the princess, ' I have heard talk of the three singing leaves, and them I wish to have before anything else in the world.' The king laughed at her for making so trifling a request, and at length exclaimed, 'I cannot say that you are very covetous, and would rather by half that you had asked for some greater gift. You shall, however, have what you desire, though it should cost me half my realm.' He then bade his daughters farewell and rode away."

Of course he goes to the fair, and on his way home happens to hear the three singing leaves, " which moved to and fro, and as they played there came forth a sound such as it would be impossible to describe." The king was glad to have found what his daughter had wished for, and was about to pluck them, but the instant he stretched forth his hand towards them, they withdrew from his grasp, and a powerful voice was heard from under the earth saying, "Touch not my leaves." " At this the king was somewhat surprised, and asked who it was, and whether he could not purchase the leaves for gold or good words. The voice answered, ' I am Prince Halt under the Earth, and you will not get my leaves either with good or bad as yon desire. Nevertheless I will propose to you one condition.' 'What condition is that?' asked the king with eagerness. ' It is,' answered the voice, ' that you promise me the first living thing that you meet when you return to your palace.' " As we anticipate, the first thing which he meets is his youngest daughter, who therefore is left with lamentation under the

liazel bush : and, as is its wont on such occasions, the ground opens, and she finds herself in a beautiful palace. Here she lives long and happily with Prince Hatt, upon condition that she shall never see him. But at last she is permitted to pay a visit to her father and sisters; and her stepmother succeeds in awakening her curiosity and her fears, lest she should really be married to some horrid monster. The princess thus allows herself to be persuaded to strike a light and gaze on her husband while he is asleep. Of course, just as her eyes have lighted upon a beautiful youth he awakes, and as a consequence of her disobedience�(here the story alters somewhat)�he is struck blind, and the two are obliged to wander over the earth, and endure all manner of misfortunes before Prince Hatt's sight is at last restored.

The sun is so apt to take the place of an almost superhuman hero, that most of the stories of such when they" are purely mythical relate some part of the sun's daily course and labors. Thus in the Greek, Perseus, Theseus, Jason, are in the main sun-heroes, though they mingle with their histories tales of real human adventure. One of the most easily traceable sun-stories is that of Perseus and the Gorgon. The later represen�tations of Medusa in Greek art give her a beautiful dead face shrouded by luxurious snaky tresses; but the earlier art presents us with a round face, distorted by a hideous grin from ear to ear, broad cheeks, low forehead, over which curl a few flattened locks. We at once see the likeness of this face to the full moon; a likeness which, without regard to mythology, forces itself upon us; and then the true story of Perseus flashes upon us as the extinction of the moon by the sun's light. This is the baneful Gorgon's head, the full moon, which so many nations superstitiously believed could exert a fatal power over the sleeper; and when slain by the son of Danae, it is the pale ghostlike disc which we see by day. It is very interesting to see how the Greeks made a myth of the moon in its�one may say�literal unidealized aspect, as well as the countless more poetical myths which spoke of the moon as a beautiful goddess, queen of the night, the virgin huntress surrounded by her pack of dogs�the stars. In the instance of Medusa these two aspects of one natural appearance are brought into close relationship, for Athens�in her character of moon-goddess�wears the Gorgon's head upon her shield.

As we have passed on to speak of the moon, we may as well notice some of the other moon-myths: though in the case of these, as of the myths of the sun, our only object must be to show the characteristic forms which this order of tales assume, so that the way may be partly cleared for their detection; nothing like a complete list of the infinitely varied shapes which the same nature-story can assume being possible. One of the most beautiful of moon-myths is surely the talc of Artemis (Diana) and Endymion. This last, the beautiful shepherd of Latmos, by his name " He who enters," is in origin the sun just entering the cave of night. The moon looking upon the setting sun is a signal for his long sleep, which in the myth becomes the sleep of death. The same myth reappears in the well-known German legend of Tann-hiiuser. He enters a mountain, the Venusberg, or Mount of Venus, and is not sent to sleep, but laid under an enchant�ment by the goddess within. In other versions of the legend the mountain is called not Venusberg but Horelberg, and from this name we trace the natural origin of the myth. For there was an old moon-goddess of the Teutons called Horel or Hursel. She therefore is the enchantress in this case; and the Christian knight falls a victim to the old German moon-goddess. It has been supposed that the story of the massacre of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins�whose bones they show to this day at Cologne�arose out of the same nature-myth; and that this St. Ursula is also none other than Hursel, followed by her myriad troop of stars.'

The northern religion has been fruitful of its sun-myths, though in this system the sun is not pre-eminent, but holds an almost equal place with the wind�the myths of Thorr and Baldur are balanced by those of Odin in his character of wind-god. And both sorts of stories have descended to a place in our nursery tales. Thorr, the champion of men, and the enemy of the Jotuns (giants), becomes in later days Jack the Giant Killer; Odin, by a like descent, the Wandering Jew, or the Pied Piper of Hameln. And thus through a hundred popular legends we can detect the natural appearance out of which they originally sprang. Let us look at them first in their old heathen forms. Thorr, the hero and sun-god, the northern Herakles, distinguishes himself as the implacable enemy of the rime-giants and frost-giants, the powers of cold and darkness; and to carry on his hostilities, he makes constant expeditions, " farings " into giant-land, or Jotunheim, as it is called; and these expeditions generally end in the thorough discomfiture of the strong but rude and foolish personifications of barren nature. One of these, the adventure to the house of Thrym, is to recover Thorr's hammer, which has been stolen by the giant and hidden many feet beneath the earth. A spy is sent from Asgard (the city of the gods) into Jotun�heim, and brings back word that Thrym will not give up his prize unless Freyja�goddess of Spring and Beauty�be given to him as his bride; and at first Thorr proposes this alternative to Freyja herself, little, as may be guessed, to her satisfaction.

" Wroth was Freyja And with fury fumed, All the jEsir's hall Under her trembled; Broken Hew the famed Brisinga-necklace."

But the wily Loki settles the difficulty. Thorr shall to Jotunheim clad in Freyja's weeds,

"Let by his side, keys jingle, and a neat coif set on his head."

So taking Loki with him clad as a serving-maid, the god fares to Thrym's house, as though he were the looked-for bride. It must, one would suppose, have been an anxious time for Thorr and Loki, while unarmed they sate in the hall of the giant; for the hero could not avoid raising some suspicions by his unwomanly appearance and demeanor. He alone devoured, we are told, an ox, eight salmon, "and all the sweetmeats women should have," and he drank eight " scalds " of mead. Thrym naturally exclaimed that he never saw brides eat so greedily or drink so much mead. But the "all-crafty" Loki sitting by, explained how this was owing to the hurry Freyja was in to behold her bridegroom, which left her no time to eat for the eight nights during which she had been journeying there. And so again when Thrym says�

" Why are so piercing Freyja's glances ? Methinks that fire burns from her eyes."

Loki explains that for the same reason she had not slept upon her journey; and the foolish, vain giant is gulled once more. At last the coveted prize, the hammer, was brought in to consecrate the marriage, and " Thorr's soul laughed in his breast, when the fierce-hearted his hammer recognized. He slew Thrym, the Thursar's (giant's) lord, and the Jotun's race crushed he utterly." At another time Thorr engages Alvis, " of the race of the Thursar,"in conversation upon all manner of topics, concerning the names which different natural objects bear among men, among gods, among giants, and among dwarfs, until he* guilefully keeps him above earth till after sunrise, which it is not possible for a dwarf or Jotun to do and live. So Alvis burst asunder.This tale shows clearly enough how much Thorr's enemies are allied with darkness.

Thorr is not always so successful. In another of his journeys³ the giants" play a series of tricks upon him, quite suitable to the Teutonic conception of the cold north, as a place of magic, glamour, and illusion. One giant induces the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him, and to hurl at it the death-dealing bolt�his hammer Mjolnir. Afterwards he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely-more than the rim has been left bare; at the same time Loki engages in an eating match with one Logi, and is utterly worsted. But in reality Thorr's horn has reached to the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Afterwards Thorr cannot lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth the great Midgard serpent which girds the whole earth, and he is overcome in a wrestling match with an old hag, whose name is Ella, that is, Old Age or Death. Enough has been said in these stories to show how directly the cloak of Thorr descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Bean-Stalk.

Closely connected with the sun god are the mythical heroes of northern poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of Germany and Scandinavia. The famous Sigurd the Volsung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of the Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem Beowulf,¹ are especially at war with dragons�which represent the powers of darkness�or with beings of a Jotun-iike character. They are all discoverers of treasure; and this so far corresponds with the character of Thorr that the thunderbolt is often spoken of as the revealer of the treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was employed as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the tales or poems in which these adventures are told w-e see how entirely unhuman in character they were, and how much the actors in the drama bear the reminiscences of the natural phenomena from which they sprang. This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is weird and imaginative in the highest degree: the atmosphere into which we are thrown seems to be the misty delusive air of Jotun�heim, and the unearthly beings whom Beowulf encounters must have had birth within the shadows of night and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on human beings, whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thorr wrestles with Ella) and puts to death, is described as an "inhabiter of the moors," the "fen and fastnesses;" he comes upon the scene "like a cloud from the misty hills, through the wan night a shadow-walker stalking"; and of hiin and his mother it is said,

" They a father know not, Whether any of them was Born before Of the dark ghosts."

They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves' retreat, and in "windy ways�

Where the mountain stream Under the nesses mist Downward flows."

Of the myths which spring from the wind, and which may therefore be reckoned the children of Odin, by far the most interesting are those which attach to him in his part of Psyco-pomp, or soul-leader, and which form a part, therefore, of an immense series of tales counected with the Teutonic ideas of death as they were detailed in the last chapter. There were many reasons why these occupied a leading place in middle-age legend. The German race is naturally a gloomy or at least a thoughtful one: and upon this natural gloom and thoughtfulness the influence of their new faith acted with re�doubled force, awaking men to thoughts not only of a new life but of a new death. Popular religion took as strong ahold of the darker as of the brighter aspects of Catholicism, and was busy gra fti ug the older notions of the soul'sf uture state upon the fresh stock of revealed religion. Thus manyof the popularnotionsboth of heaven and hell maybe discovered in the beliefs of heathen Germany. Let us, therefore, abandoning the series of myths which belong properly to the Aryan religious beliefs as given in chapter ix. (though upon these, so numerous are they, we seem soarcely to have begun), turn to others which illus�trate our last chapter. Upon one we have already touched; Odin, as chooser of the dead, hurrying through the air towards a battle-field with his troop of shield-maidens, the Valkyriur '; or if we like to present the simpler nature-myth, the wind bearing away the departing breath of dying men, and the clouds which he carries on with him in his course. For there is no doubt that these Yalkyriur, these shield or swan maidens, who have the power of transforming themselves at pleasure into birds, are none other than the clouds, perhaps like the cattle of Indra, especially the clouds of sunrise. We meet with them elsewhere than in northern mythology. The Urvasi, whose story we have been relating just now, after the separation from her mortal husband changes herself into a bird and is found by Pururavas

in this disguise, sitting with her friends the Gandhavas uponi the water of a lake. This means the clouds of evening sitting upon the wide blue sky. The Valkyriur themselves, whenj they have been married to men, often leave them as thej Indian fairy left her husband, and lest they should do so it is} not safe to restore them the swan's plumage which they wore as Valkyriur; should they again obtain their old equipment they will be almost sure to don it and desert their home to return to their old life. The Valkyriur, therefore, are clouds; and in so far as they appear in the legends of other nations have no intimate connection with Odin. But when they are the clouds of sunset and when Odin in his character of soul-bearer becomes before all things the wind of the setting sun (that breeze which so often rises just as the sun goes down, and which itself might stand for the escaping soul of the dying day), then the Valkyriur make part of an ancient myth of death. And almost all the stories of swan maidens, or transformations into swans, which are so familiar to the ears of childhood, originate from Odin's warrior maidens. If we notice the plot of these stories, we shall see that in them too the transformation usually takes place at sun-setting or sun-rising. For instance, in the tale of the six swans in Grimm's Household Stories? the enchanted brothers of the princess can only reappear in their true shapes just one hour before sunset.

In Christian legends,'subject to the changes which inevitably followa change of belief, thegodsof Asgard become demoniacal powers; and Odin the chief god takes the place of the arch�fiend. For this part he is doubly suited by bis character of conductor of the souls; if he formerly led them to heaven, he now thrusts them down to hell. But so many elements came together to compose the mediaeval idea of the devil that in this character the individuality of Odin is scarcely preserved. At times a wish to revive something of this personal character was felt, especially when the frequent sound of the wind awoke old memories; then Odin re-eme'rges as some particular fiend or damned human soul. He is the Wandering Jew, a being whose eternal restlessness well keeps up the character of the wind blowing where it listeth: or he is, as we have said, the Wild Huntsman of the Harz, and of many other places.

The name of this being, Hackelberg, or Hackelbarend (cloak bearer), sufficiently points him out as Odin, who in the heathen traditions had been wont to wander over the earth clad in a blue cloak,and broad hat, and carrying a staff. Hackelberg, the huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, had refused even on his death-bed the ministrations of a priest, and swore that the cry of his dogs was pleasanter to him than holy rites, and that he would rather hunt for ever upon earth than go to heaven. "Then," said the man of God, "thou shalt hunt on until the Day of Judgment." Another legend relates that Hackelberg was a wicked noble who was wont to hunt on Sundays as on other days, and (here comes in the popular version) to impress the poor peasants to aid him. One day he was joined suddenly by two horsemen. One was mild of aspect, but the other was grim and fierce, and from his horse's mouth and nostril breathed fire. Hackelberg turned then from his good angel and went on with his wild chase, and now, in company of the fiend, he hunts and will hunt till the last day. He is Called in Germany the hel-jdger, " hell hunter." The peas�ants hear his "hoto" "hutu," as the storm-wind rushes past their doors, and if they are alone upon the hill-side they hide their faces while the hunt goes by. The white owl, Totosel, is a nun who broke her vows, and now mingles her " tutu " (towhoo)with his " holoa." He hunts, accompanied by two dogs (the two dogs of Yama), in heaven, all the year round, save upon the twelve nights between Christmas and Twelfth-night.² If any door is left open upon the night when Hackelberg goes by, one of the dogs will run in and lie down in the ashes of the hearth, nor will any power be able to make him stir. During all the ensuing year there will be trouble in that household, but when the year has gone round and the hunt comes again, the unbidden guest will rise from his couch, and, wildly howling, rush forth to join his master. Strangely refracted there lurks in this part of the story a ray of the Vedic sleep-god Sarameyas.

These twelve nights occupy in the middle-age legends the place of a sort of battle-ground be'ween the powers of light and darkness. One ohvions reason of this is that they lie in midwinter, when the infernal powers are the strongest. Another reason perhaps is that they lie be�tween the great Christian feast and the great heathen one, the feast of Yule. Each party might be expected to put forth its full power.

" Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house, oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend."

The Valkyruir in their turn are changed by the mediaeval spirit into witches. The Witches' Sabbath, the old beldames on broom-sticks riding through the air, to hold their revels on the Brocken, reproduce the swan maidens hurrying to join the flight of Odin. And, again, changed once more, " Old Mother Goose " is but a more modern form of a middle-age witch, when the thought of witches no longer strikes terror. And while we are upon the subject of witches it may be well to recall how the belief in witches has left its trace in our word " nightmare." Mara was throughout Europe believed to be the name of a very celebrated witch somewhere in the north, though the exact place of her dwelling was variously stated. And it is highly probable that this name Mara was once a bye-name of the death-goddess Hel, and itself etymologically connected with the name of the sea (Meer), the sea being, as we have seen, according to one set of beliefs, the home of the soul.

Odin, or a being closely analogous with him, reappears in the familiar tale of the Pied Piper of Hameln, he who, when the whole town of Hameln suffered from a plague of rats and knew not how to get rid of them, appeared suddenly �no one knew from whence�and professed himself ahle to accomplish their wish by means of the secret magic of his pipe. But it is a profanatiou to tell the enchanted legend otherwise than in the enchanted language of Browning :�

" Into the street the piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magi i slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then like a musical adept To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled."

Then the townsfolk, freed from their burden, refused the piper his promised reward, and scornfully chased him from the town. On the 26th of June he was seen again, but this time (Mr. Browning has not incorporated this little fact) fierce of aspect and dressed like a huntsman, yet still blowing upon the magic pipe.

Now it is not the rats who follow, but the children :�

" All the little hoys and girls, With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after The wonderful music with shouting and laughter."

And so he leads them away to the Koppelberg Hill, and

" Lo. as they reached the mountain side, A wondrous portal opened wide, As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed ; And the Piper advanced and the children followed. And when all were in, to the very last, The door in the mountain side shut fast."

This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we come to examine into the origin of popular tales how manv we find that had at first a funeral character. This Piper hath indeed a magic music which none can disobey, for it is the whisper of death; he himself is the soul-leading Hermes (the wind, the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But the legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic; for it is a Slavonic notion which likens the soul to a mouse.When we have got this clue, which the modern folk lore easily gives us, the Odinic character of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, in this particular myth we can almost trace a history of the meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the junction of their legends. Let us suppose there had been some great and long remembered epidemic which had proved peculiarly fatal to the children of Hameln and the country round about. The Slavonic dwellers there�and in pre-historic times the Slaves probably spread quite as far as the Weser�would speak of these deaths mythically as the departure of the mice (i. e. the souls), and perhaps keeping the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the water. Or further, they might feign that these souls were led there by a piping wind god : he too is the common property of the Aryan folk. Then the Germans coming in, and wishing to express the legend in their

mythological form, would tell how the same Piper had piped awav all the children from the town. So a double story would spring up about the same event. The Weser represents one image of death, and might have served for the children as well as for the mice : to make the legend fuller, however, another image is selected for them, the dark, " concealed" place, namely, Hel, or the cave of Night and Death.

The two images of death which occur in the last story rival each other through the field of middle-age legend and ro�mance. When we hear of a man being borne along in a boat, or lying deep in slumber beneath a mountain, we may let our minds wander back to Baldur sailing across the ocean in his burning ship Hringhom, and to the same Baldur in the halls of Hel's palace. The third image of death is the blazing pyre unaccompanied by any sea voyage. One or other of these three allegories meet us at every turn. If the hero has been snatched away by fairy power to save him from dying, and the last thing seen of him was in a boat�as Arthur disappears upon the lake Avalon�the myth hold out the hope of his return, and sooner or later the story of this return nill break off and become a separate legend. Hence the numerous half-unearthly heroes, such as Lohengrin, who come men know not whence, and are first seen sleeping in a boat upon a river. These are but broken halves of complete myths which should have told of the former disappearance of the knight by the same route. Both portions really belong to the tale of Lohengrin; he went away first in a ship in search of the holy grail, and in the truest version returns in like manner in a boat drawn by a swan. In some tales he is called the Knight of the Swan. He comes suddenly, in answer to a prayer to Heaven for help, uttered by the distressed Else of Brabant. But he does not return at once again to the Paradise which has sent him to earth. He remains upon earth, and becomes the husband of Else, and a famous war�rior; and part of another myth entwines itself with his story. Else must not ask his name: but she disobevs his impera�tive command, and this fault parts them for ever. Here we have Cupid and Psyche, or Prince Hatt and his Wife, over again. The boat appears once more drawn by the same swan, Lohengrin steps into it, and disappears from the haunts of men. We have already seen how through the Valkyruir the swan is connected with ideas of death. It remains to notice how they are naturally so connected by the beautiful legend�myth or fact I do not know�that the swan siugs once only in life, namely, when he is leaving it, that his first song is his own funeral melody. A much older form of the Lohengrin myth is referred to in the opening lines of Beowulf, where an ancestor of that hero is said to have been found, a little child, lying asleep in an open boat which bad drifted, no one knows whence, to the shore of Gothland.

Death being thus so universally symbolized by the River of Death, it is easy to see the origin of the myth that ghosts will not cross living water. It meant nothing else than that a ghost cannot return again to life. In the dark days which followed the overthrow of the Western Empire, when all the civilization of its remoter territories had melted away, there grew up among the fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of this island were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, that in the villages of the Gaulish coast the fishermen were summoned by rotation to perform the dreadful task of ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knock�ing was heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the water as though heavily freighted, but yet to their eyes empty. Each stepping in, took his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night across a distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily scarcely compass in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore (our coast), they heard names called over and voices answering as if by rota, and they felt their boats becoming light. Then when all the ghosts had landed they were wafted back to Gaul.

Among underground-sleepers, who reproduce the second image of death, the most celebrated are Kaisar Karl in the Unterberg�the under-hill, or hill leading to the under-world; or, as another legend goes, in the Ntirnberg, which is really

the Niedern-berg, the down-leading hill; and Frederick Red-Beard sleeping in like manner at Kaiserslautern, or under the Rabenspurg (raven's hill). Deep below the earth he sits, his knights around him, their armor on, the horses harnessed in the stable ready to come forth at Germany's hour of need. His long red beard has grown through the table on which his head is resting. Once, it is said, a shepherd chanced upon the cave which leads down to the under-ground palace and awoke the Emperor from his slumber. " Are the ravens still flying round the hill ?" asked Frederick. "Yes." "Then must I sleep another hundred years."

There are two forms of allusion to the old heathen custom of fire-burial. One is by the direct mention of a fire�a circle of fire, probably, through which the Knight must ride; the second is by putting in place of the fire the thorn which was the invariable concomitant of the funeral pile. A thorn-bush having been employed as the foundation of the fire, a thorn becomes a symbol of the funeral, and so of death. Hence the constant stories of the Sleep-thorn. In the tale of Sigurd the Volsung both these symbols are used; when Sigurd first finds Brynhild she has been pricked by Odin with a sleep-thorn, in revenge, because she took part against his favorite Hialmgunnar ; for she was a Valkyria. Sigurd awakes her. At another time he rides to her through a circle of fire which she has set round her house, and which no other man dared face. In the myth of Sigurd, twice as it were riding through death to Brynhild, we see first of all a nature-myth precisely of the same kind as the myth of Freyr and Gerda (p. 143), precisely the reverse of the myth of Persephone. Brynhild is the dead earth restored by the kiss of the sun, or of summer. Afterwards the part of Brynhild is taken by the Sleeping Beauty, and Sigurd becomes the prince who breaks through the thorn-hedge. Observe one thing in the last story. The prick from the sleep-thorn becomes a prick from a spinning-wheel, and thus loses all its original meaning, while the circle of fire is transformed into a thorn-hedge, proof sufficient that they were convertible ideas. Lastly, it remains to say, that the stories of glass mountains ascended by knights are probably allegories of death�heaven being spoken of to this day by Russian and German peasants as a glass mountain�and perhaps the glass slipper of Cinderella is so too. 8*

 

CHAPTER XII.

picture-writing.

 

Though it is true, as we have said before, that every manu�factured article involves a long chapter of unwritten history to account for its present form, and the perfection of the material from which it is wrought, there is no one of them, not the most artistic, that will so well repay an effort to hunt it through its metamorphoses in the ages to its first starting-point, as will the letters that rapidly drop from our pen when we proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a manu�factured article at which a long, long series of unknown artists have wrought, expanding, contracting, shaping, pruning, till at length, the result of centuries of effort, our alphabet stands clear�a little army of mute, unpretending signs, that are at once the least considered of our inherited riches�mere jots and tittles�and the spells by which all our great feats of genius are called into being. Does unwritten history or tradition tell us anything of the people to whose invention we owe them, or, on the other hand, can we per�suade the little shapes with which we are familiar to so animate themselves, and give such an account of the stages by which they grew into their present likeness, as will help us to understand better than we did before the mental and social conditions of the times of their birth ? One question at least they answer clearly ; we know that while in their earliest forms they must have preceded the birth of History, they were the forerunners and heralds of his appearance, and if we are obliged to relegate their invention to the dark period of unrecorded events, we must place it at least in the last of the twilight hours, the one that preceded daybreak, for they come leading sunlight and certainty behind them. It will be hard if these revealers of other births should prove to be entirely silent about their own. Another point seems to grow clear as we think. As letters are the elements by which records come to us, it is not in records, or at least not in early records, that we must look for a history of their invention. Like all other tools, they will have lent themselves silently to the ends for which they were called into being. For a long, long time they will have been too busy giving the histories of their employers to tell us consciously anything about themselves. We must leave the substance of records then, and look to their manner and form, if we would unravel the long story of the invention and growth of our alphabet; and as it is easiest to begin with the thing that is nearest to us, let us pause before one of our written words, and ask ourselves exactly what it is to us.

In tracing the growth of language, we have learned that words were at first descriptive of the things they named, in fact, pictures to the ear. What then is a written word ? Is it too a picture, and what does it picture, to the eye ? When we have written the words cat, man, lion, what have we done ? We have brought the images of certain things into our minds, and that by a form presented to the eye; but is it the form of the objeqt we immediately think of ? No, it is the form of its name; it is therefore the picture of a sound. To picture sound is, surely, a very far-fetched notion, one that may have grown out of many previous efforts to convey thought from mind to mind; but certainly not likely to occur first to those who began the attempt to give permanent shape to the thoughts floating within them. So great and difficult a task must have baffled the powers of many enter�prises, and been approached in many ways before the first steps towards accomplishing it were securely taken. We shall find that the history of our alphabet is a record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of sound-writing has been evolved; the first attempts to record events were made in a different direction. Since, as we have agreed, we are not likely to find a record of how events were first recorded, and as the earliest, attempts are likely to have been imperfect and little durable, we must be content to form our notions of the earliest stage in our grand invention, by observing the method used by savages now, to aid their memories; and if we wish to determine the period in the history of the human race when such efforts are likely to have been first made, we must recall what we have already learned of the history of primitive man, and settle at what stage of his development the need for arti�ficial aids to memory would first press upon him. Stories and poetry are not likely to have been the first things written down. While communities were small and young, there was no need to write painfully what it was so delightful to repeat from mouth to mouth, and so easy for memories to retain; and when the stock of tradition and the treasure of song grew so large in any tribe as to exceed the capacity of ordinary memories (greater before the invention of writing, let us re�member, than now), men with unusual gifts would be chosen and set apart for the purposes of remembering and reciting, and of handing down to disciples in the next generation, the precious literature of the tribe. Such an order of remem�berers would soon come to be looked upon as sacred, or at least highly honorable, and would have privileges and im�munities bestowed on them which would make them jealous of an invention that would lessen the worth of their special gift. The invention of writing, then, is hardly likely to have come from the story-tellers or bards. It was probably to aid the memory in recalling something less attractive and more secret thau a story or a song that the first record was made.

So early as the time of the cave-dwellers, there was a beginning of commerce. Traces have been found of work�shops belonging to that period, where flint weapons and tools were made in such quantities as evidently to have been designed for purposes of barter, and the presence of amber and shells in places far from the coast, speaks of trading journeys. With bargains and exchange of commodities, aids to memory must surely have come in; and when we think of the men of the Neolithic age as traders, we can hardly be wrong in also believing them to have taken the next step in civilization which trade seems to bring with it�the invention of some system of mnemonics.

No man or woman would be likely to trust their bargain�ing to another without giving him some little token or pledge by way of safeguard against mistake or forgetfulness. It would be a very trifling, transitory thing at first; something in the nature of a tally, or a succession of knots or woven threads in a garment, allied to the knot which we tie on our handkerchief over night to make us remember something in the morning. It seems hardly worthy of notice, and yet the invention of that artificial aid to memory is the germ of writ�ing, the little seed from which such great things have come. Unfortunately our discoveries of stone-age relics have not yet furnished us with any helps to understand how the ancient men managed and carried out the aids to memory they must have had; but we can trace the process of invention among still extant races, who keep pretty closely to first methods. Some tribes of Red Indians keep records on cords called wampum, by means of beads and knots, and when an embassy is sent from one chieftain to another, the principal speaker carries one of these pieces of wampum, and from it reads off the articles of the proposed treaty, almost as easily as if it were from a note-book.

In the Eastern Archipelago, and in Polynesia proper, these cord-records were in use forty years ago, and by means of them the tax-gatherers in the Island of Hawaii kept clear accounts of all articles collected from the inhabi�tants of the island. The revenue book of Hawaii was a rope 400 fathoms long, divided into portions corresponding to districts in the island, and each portion was under the care of a tax-gatherer, who by means of knots, loops, and tufts of different shapes, colors, and sizes, managed to keep an accurate account of the number of hogs, dogs, pieces of sandal�wood, &c, at which each inhabitant of his district was rated. The Chinese have a legend that in very early times their people used little cords marked by knots of different sizes, instead of writing; but the people who brought the cord system of mnemonics to the greatest perfection were the Peruvians. They were still following it at the time of their conquest by the Spaniards; but they had elaborated it with such care as to make it available for the preservation of even minute details of the statistics of the country. The ropes on which they kept their records were called quipus, from quipu, a knot. They were often of great length and thickness, and from the main ropes depended smaller ones, distinguished by colors appropriate to subjects of which their knots treated�as, white for silver, yellow for gold, red for soldiers, green for corn, parti-colored when a subject that required division was treated of. These dependent colored strings had again other little strings hanging from them, and on these exceptions were noted. For instance, on the quipus devoted to population� the colored strings on which the number of men in each town and village was recorded had depending from them little strings for the widowers, and no doubt the widows and the old maids had their little strings from the colored cord that denoted women. One knot meant ten; a double knot, one hundred; two singles, side by side, twenty; two doubles, two hundred; and the position of the knots on their string and their form were also of immense importance, each subject having its proper place on the quipus and its proper form of knot. The art of learning to read quipus must have been difficult to acquire; it was practised by special func�tionaries, called quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers, who, however, seem only to have been able to expound their own records; for when a quipus was sent from a distant province to the capital, its own guardian had to travel with it to explain it. (A clumsy and cumbrous way of sending a letter, was it not ?) Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by other methods of recording events as civilization advanced; but still they continued to be resorted to under special cir�cumstances, and by people who had not the pens of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a thong, and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian chiefs, that they might untie a knot every day, and go back to their own land if he had not returned when all the knots were undone, and the Scythians who, about the same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example of another way of attaching meaning to things, and so using them as aids to memory,� writing letters with objects instead of pen and ink, in fact. Here, however, symbolism comes in, and makes the mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as capable of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambassadors presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a mouse, a bird, a frog, and an arrow, and the message with which they had been en�trusted was that, unless he could hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air like a bird, or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the arrows of the Scythians.

Such, too, was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers tell the sons what had happened in that place; and again such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than words alone can convey. Perhaps, however, we ought hardly to call these last examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten the effect of words. We may perhaps regard them as a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider�picturing. It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods of making records as stages of progress and develop�ment, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first anymore than the introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting down of the knight's glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their mem�ories even now.

Helps to memory of all kinds never get beyond being helps. They cannot carry thought from one to another without the intervention of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep fast the words that have to be said; they localize tradition, but they cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable to become useless by the death of the man, or order of men, to whom they have been entrusted.

A more independent and lasting method of recording events was sure to be aimed at sooner or later; and we may conjec�ture that it usually took its rise among a people at the period when their national pride was so developed as to make them anxious that the deeds of some conspicuous hero should be made known, not only to those interested in telling and hearing of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it, such as all seeing the picture would understand; and accordingly we find that the earliest step beyond artificial helps to memory is the making of rude pictures which aim at showing a deed or event as it occurred without suggesting the words of a narrative; this is called "picturing" as distin�guished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very early art we may feel sure from the fact that rude pictures of ani�mals have been found among the relics of the earliest stone age. We are not perhaps justified in conjecturing that the pictures actually found are rough memorials of some real hunting scene, but we learn from them that the thought of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a likeness been attained to, and the idea of using this power to transmit events lies so near to its possession, that we can hardly believe one to have been long present without the other. To enable ourselves to imagine the sort of picture-records with which the stone-age men may have ornamented some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine the doings of people who have continued in the same stage of civilization down to historic times.

Some curious pictures done by North American Indians have been found on rocks and stones, and on the stems of pine trees in America, which furnish excellent examples of early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his Early History of Mankind, gives engravings of several of these shadowy records of long-past events. One of these, which was found ou the smoothed sur�face of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude outline of two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a peculiar tail and the other by a fish, and beyond these a quantity of shapes meant for a particular kind of fish. The entire picture records the successes of two chieftains named Copper-tail Bear and Cat�fish, in a fishing excursion. Another picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake Superior is more elaborate, and interests us by showing a new element in picturing, through which it was destined to grow into its next stage. This more elaborate picture shows an arch with three suus in it�a tor�toise, a man about to mount a horse, and several canoes, one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that the chief King-fisher made an expedition of three davs across a lake, and arriving safely on land, mounted his horse. The new element introduced into this picture is symbolism, the same that transformed the homely system of tallies into the

Scythian's graceful living message to Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power of expression, which will soon necessitate a new form. The tortoise is used as a symbol of dry land. The arch is, of course, the sky, and the three suns in it mean three days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his thought was on the edge of picture-writing, which is the next stage in the upward progress of the art of recording events, and the stage at which some nations have terminated their efforts.

Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims to convey to the mind, not a representation of an event, but a narrative of the event in words, each word being pictured. The distinction is important, for the change from one system to the other involves an immense, progress in the art of per�petuating thought. Let us take a sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two methods. A man slew a lion with a bow and arrows while the sun went doxon. Picturing would show the man with a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struok by the arrow, the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a series of little pictures and symbols dealing separately with each word�a man, a symbol for slew, say a hand smiting, a lion, a connecting symbol for " with," and so on. We see at once how much more elaborate and exact the second method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous story possible. We also discover that these various stages of writing correspond to developments of language, and that as languages grow in capacity to express nobler thoughts, a greater stress would be put upon invention to render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols, till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so rendered, and another method of showing words to the eye will have to be thought of�for all languages at least that attain their full development. That a great deal maybe expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn from the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have come down to us, and from the present writing of the Chinese, who with their radical language have preserved the pictorial character that well accords with an early stage of language.

The Red Indians of North America have invented some very ingenious methods of picturing time and numbers. They have names for the thirteen moons or months into which they divide the year�Whirlwind moon, moon when the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, &c, and when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition wished to leave a record of the time of his departure for a friend who should follow him on the same track, he carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name of the moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of the state of the moon in the heavens on the night when he set out, that his friends had no difficulty in reading the date correctly. The Indians of Virginia kept a record of events in the form of a series of wheels of sixty spokes, each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years being the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes meant years, and on each one a picture of the prin�cipal occurrences of the year was drawn.

A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania says that he saw a wheel, on one spoke of which the first arrival of Europeans in America was recorded. The history of this dis�astrous event for the Indians was given by a picture of a white swan spitting fire from its month. The swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over the sea, its white plu�mage recalled the color of their faces, and fire issuing from its mouth represented fire-arms, the possession of which had made them conquerors. The North American Indians also use rude little pictures, rough writing we may call it, to- help them to remember songs and charms. Each verse of a song is con�centrated into a little picture, the sight of which recalls the words to one who has once learned it. A drawing of a little man, with four marks on his legs and two on his breast, recalls the adverse charm, " Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must you sit still." A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, " Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over." This sort of picturing seems to be very near writing, for it serves to recall words�but still only to recall them�it would not suggest the words to those who had never heard the song before; it is only an aid to memory, and its employers have only as yet taken the first step in the great discovery we are talking about. The Mexicans, though they had attained to much greater skill than this in the drawing and coloring of pictures, had not progressed much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do not seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of mnemonics, which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, required a race of inter�preters to hand down their meaning¹ from one generation to another. This fact makes us regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first Spanish archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the great store of vellum rolls, and folds on folds of cloth covered with paintings, that had been discovered at Anahuac, the chief seat of Mexican learning, ordered the entire collection to be burnt in a heap; a moun�tain heap, the chroniclers of the time call it�lest they should contain incantations or instructions for the practice of magical arts. As some excuse for this notion of the archbishop's we will mention the subjects treated of in the five books of picture-writing which Montezuma gave to Cortez :�the first book treated of years and seasons; the second of days and festi�vals; the third of dreams and omens; the fourth of the naming of children; the fifth of ceremonies and prognostications.

The few specimens of Mexican writing which have come down to us, show that, though the Toltecs had not used their picture signs as skilfully as some other nations have done, they had taken the first step towards phonetic, or sound-writing; a step which, if pursued, would have led them through some such process as we shall afterwards see was followed by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, to the formation of a true alphabet. They had begun to write proper names of chiefs and towns by pictures of things that recalled the sound of their names, instead of by a symbol suggestive of the appearance or quality of the place or chieftain, or of the meaning of the names. It is difficult to explain this without pictures; but as this change of method involves a most im�portant step in the discovery of the art of writing, we had better pause upou it a little, and get it clear to our minds. There was a king whose name occurs in a chronicle now exist�ing, called Itz-co-atle, Knife-snake; his name is generally written by a picture of a snake, with flint knives stuck in it; but in one place it is indicated in a different manner. The first syllable is still -pictured by a knife; but for the second, instead of a snake, we find an earthen pot and a sign for water. Now the Mexican name for pot is " co-mitle," for water "atle;" read literally the name thus pictured would read "Itz-comitle-atle;" but it is clear, since the name intended was "Itz-co-atle," that the pot is drawn to suggest only the first syllable of its name, co, and by this change it has become no longer a picture, but a phonetic, syllabic sign, the next step but one before a true letter. What great results can be elaborated from this change you will see when we begin to speak of Egyptian writing.

We must not leave picture-writing till we have said some�thing about the Chinese character, in which we find the highest development of which direct representation of things appears capable. Though we should not think it, while looking at the characters on a Chinese tea-paper or box, every one of those groups of black strokes and dots which seem so shapeless to our eyes is a picture of an object; not a picture of the sound of its name, as our written words are, but a representa�tion real or symbolic of the thing itself. Early specimens of Chinese writing show these groups of strokes in a stage when a greater degree of resemblance to the thing signified is pre�served; but the exigencies of quick writing, among a people who write and read a great deal, have gradually reduced the pictures more and more to the condition of arbitrary signs, whose connection with the things signified must be a matter of habit and memory. The task of learning a sign for every word of the language in place of conquering the art of spelling does seem, at first sight, to put Chinese children in a pitiable condition as compared with ourselves. To lessen our com�passion, we may recall that the Chinese language is still in the root stage (having been checked in its growth in fact by a too early invention of these same picture-signs), and that con�sequently it comprehends comparatively few sounds, the same sound being used to express meanings by a difference in intonation. This difference could not easily be given in writ�ing; it is therefore almost a necessity to recall the thing itself to the mind instead of its name.

Pictorial signs are used in several different ways, some�times as real pictures, sometimes as ideographs, which again may be divided into groups as they are used�metaphorically, as a bee for industry; enigmatically, as among the Egyptians, an ostrich feather is used as a symbol of justice, because all the plumes in the wing of this bird were supposed to be of equal length; by syndoche, putting a part for the whole; as two eyeballs for eyes; by metonomy, putting cause for effect; as a tree for shadow; the disk of the sun for a day, &c. This system of writing in pictures and symbols requires so much ingenuity, such hosts of pretty poetic inventions, that perhaps there is less dulness than would at first appear in getting the Chinese alphabet of some ten thousand signs or so by heart. "We will mention a few Chinese ideographs in illustration. The sign for a man placed over the sign for a mountain-peak signifies a hermit; the sign for a mouth and that for a bird placed side by side signify the act of singing; a hand holding a sweeping-brush is a woman; a man seated on the ground, a son (showing the respectful position assigned to children in China); an ear at the opening of a door means curiosity; two eyes squinting towards the nose mean to ob�serve carefully; one eye squinting symbolizes the color white, because so much of the white of the eye is shown when the ball is in that position; a mouth at an open door is a note of interrogation, and also the verb to question.

Even Chinese writing, however, has not remained purely ideographic. Some of the signs are used phonetically to picture sound, and this use must necessarily grow now that intercourse with Western nations introduces new names, new inventions and new ideas, which, somehow or other, must get themselves represented in the Chinese language and writing.

The invention of determinative signs�characters put be�side the word to show what class of objects a word belongs to� helps the Chinese to overcome some of the difficulties which their radical language offers to the introduction of sound-writing. For example, the word Pa has eight different mean�ings, and when it is written phonetically, a reader would have to choose between eight objects to which he might apply it, if there were not a determinative sign by its side which gives him a hint how to read it. This is as if when we wrote the word vessel we were to add "navigation" when we in�tended a ship; and "household" when we meant a jug or puncheon. The Chinese determinative signs are not, however, left to each writer's fancy. Two hundred and fourteen signs (originally themselves pictures, remember) have been chosen out, and are always used in this way. The classes into which objects are divided by these numerous signs are minute, and do not appear to follow any scientific method or arrangement. There is a sign to show that a written word belongs to the class noses, another for rats, another for frogs, another for tortoises. One is inclined to think that the helpful signs must be as hard to remember as the words themselves, and that they can only be another element in the general confusion. Probably their frequent recurrence mates them soon become familiar to Chinese readers and they act as finger�posts to guide the thoughts into the right direction. De�terminative signs have always come in to help in the transi�tional stage between purely ideographic and purely phonetic writing, and were used by both Egyptians and Assyrians in their elaborate systems as soon as the phonetic principle be�gan to be employed among their ideographs.

It is an interesting fact that the Japanese have dealt with the Chinese system of writing precisely as did the Phoenicians with the Egyptian hieroglyphics. They have chosen forty-seven signs from the ten thousand employed by the Chinese, and they use them phonetically only; that is to say, as true sound-carrying letters.

 

CHAPTER XIII.

phonetic writing

 

We have now to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the same signs) which were origin�ally meant to recall objects to the eye, have ended in being used to suggest, or, shall we say, picture, sounds to the ear. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business to hunt the letters of which it is formed through the changes they must have undergone while they were taking upon themselves the new office of suggesting sound. We said too that we must not expect to find any written account of this change, and that it is only by examining the forms of the records of other events that this greatest event of literature can be made out. What we want is to see the signs, while busy in telling us other history, beginning to perform their new duties side by side with the old, so that we may be sure of their identity ; and this oppor�tunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to cling to everything that had once been done, never altogether left off employing their first methods, even after they had taken another and yet another step towards a more perfect system of writing, but carried on the old ways and the new improvements side by side. The nature of their language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, was one cause of this inter�mixture of methods in their writing ; it had partly but not entirely outgrown the stage in which picture-signs are most useful. Ideograph is the proper name for a picture-sign, which, as soon as picture-writing supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought quite as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are the earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong to the time when the invention of writing was in the stage of picturing: we only conjecture that it passed through this earliest stage by finding examples of picturing mixed with their other kinds of writing. Each chapter of the Ritual, the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more designs at its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very carefully and ingeniously pictured, and the records of royal triumphs and progresses which are cut out on temple and palace walls in ideographic and phonetic signs, are always prefaced by a large picture which tells the same story in the primitive method of picturing without words.

The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the ancient Egyptians carried to great perfection, and reduced to a careful system. The signs for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen according to each writer's fancy. Every picture had its settled value, and was always used in the same way. A sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed. A heart drawn in a certain way always meant " love," an eye with a tear on the lash meant " grief," two hands holding a shield and spear meant the verb "to fight," a tongue meant "to speak," a foot-print " to travel," a man kneeling on the ground signified " a conquered enemy," &c. Conjunctions and prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs and nouns : " also " was pictured by a coil of rope with a second band across it, "and" by a coil of rope with an arm across it, " over"' by a circle surmounting a square, " at" by the picture of a hart reposing near the sign for water�a signifi�cant picture for such a little word, which recalls to our minds, "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks," and leads us to wonder whether the writer of the Psalm were not familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyph.

So much was done in this way, we almost wonder that the need for another method came to be felt; perhaps a peculiarity of the Egyptian language helped the splendid thought of picturing sound to flash one happy day into the mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting his sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of ancient Egypt, like that of China (being, as we said before, in part a radical ' language), had a great many words alike in sound but different in meaning, and it could not fail to happen that some of these words with two meanings would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought difficult to symbolize; for example, the ancient Egyptian word neb means a basket and a ruler; and nofre means a lute and goodness. There would come a day when a clever priest, cutting a record on a wall, would bethink him of putting a lute iustead of the more elaborate symbol that had hitherto been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and might not have struck any one at the time as involving more than the saving of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it was the germ out of which our system of writing sprang. The priest who did that had taken the first step towards picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign�the true if remote parent indeed of one of our own twenty-four letters of the alphabet. Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. The writers once started on the road of making signs stand for sounds would observe how much fewer sounds there are than objects and ideas, and that words even when unlike are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice on a wall, and intended to use ideographs instead of letters, and moreover if the words manage, mansion, manly, mantles, came into our sentence, should we not begin each of these words by a figure of a man ? and again, if we had to write treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture of a tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign often for part of a word, than to invent a fresh symbol for each entire word as we wrote it. For the remaining syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps soon dis-- cover that in each syllable there were in fact several sounds, or movements of lips or tongue, and that the same sounds differently combined came over and over again in all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in ordinary speech, and the thought of choosing a particular picture to i-.represent each movement might occur; we should then have invented an alphabet in its early stage of development. That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite reached its end.

They began by having syllabic signs for proper names. Osiri was a name that occurred frequently in their sacred writings, and they happened to have two words in their language which made up its sound. Os a throne, iri an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne came to he the syllabic sign for the sound os, the oval of an eye for the sound iri; in like manner Totro, the name of an early king, was written by a hand Tot and a circle Ho, and thus a system of spelling by syllables was established. Later they began to divide syllables into movements of the speaking organs, and to represent these movements by drawing objects whose name began with the movement intended. For example, a picture of a lion (labo) was drawn not for the whole sound (labo) but for the liquid I; an owl (mvlag) stood for the lahial m; a water-jug (nem) for n. They had now in fact invented letters, but though they had made the great discovery they did not use it in the best way. They could not make up their minds to keep to phonetic writing, and throw away their pictures and ideo�graphs. They continued to mix all these methods together, so that when they painted a lion�it might be a picture and mean lion, it might be a symbolic sign and mean pre�eminence, or it might he a true letter and stand for the liquid I. The Egyptians were obliged to invent a whole army of determinative signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they placed hefore their pictures to show when a group was to be read according to its sound, when it was used symbolically, and when it was a simple representation of the object intended.

Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptians, is that they were not content with a single sign for a single sound, they had a great, many different pictures for each letter, and used them in fanciful methods: for example, if I occurred in the name of a king, or god, they would use the lion picture to express it, thinking it appropriate; but if the same sound occurred in the name of a queeu, they would use a lotus-lily as more feminine and elegant. They had as many as twenty different pictures which could be used for the first letter of our alphabet a, and thirty for the letter h, one of which closely resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm-branches held by two arms which make the cross of the H. No letter had fewer than five pictures to express its sound, from which the writer might choose according to his fancy ; or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he had to fill up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the effect in form and color he wished his sentence to produce. Then again, all their letters were not quite true letters (single breathings). The Egyptians never got quite clear about vowels and consonants, and generally spelt words (unless they began with a vowel sound) by consonants only, the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as their own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true letters.

Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was used ornamentally as decoration for the walls of their houses and temples, and took with them the place of the tapestry of later times, the space required to carry out their complex system of writing was no objection to it in their eyes; neither did they care much about the difficulty of learning so elaborate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of reading and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of priests whose occupation and glory it was. When writing became more common, and was used for ordinary as well as sacred purposes, the pictorial element disappeared from some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of making the pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, as the Chinese signs now are.

The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the Hieratic (used by a priest), which was employed for the sacred writings only, and the Demotic used by the people, which was employed for law-papers, letters, and all writing that did not touch on religious matters or enter into the province of the priest. Yet, though literature increased and writing was much practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of life (we see pictures on the tombs of the.great man's upper servant seated before his desk and recording with reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the flocks and herds belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest times when Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and Hieratic characters written, the same confusing variety of signs were employed� pictorial, ideographic, symbolic, phonetic�all mixed up to�gether, with nothing to distinguish them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which themselves added a new element to the complexity.

It was left for a less conservative and more enter�prising people than the ancient Egyptians to take the last and greatest step in perfecting the invention which the ancient Egyptians had brought so far on its road, and by throwing away all the first attempts, allow the serviceable, successful parts of the system to stand out clear. The Phoenicians, to whom tradition points as the introducers of our alphabet into Europe, and who, during early ages, were in very close political and trading connection with the ancient Egyptians, are now believed to be the authors of the improve�ment by which we benefit. They did not invent the alphabet which the Greeks learned from them; they could have had no reason to invent signs, when they must have been well ac�quainted with the superabundance that had been in use for centuries before they began to build their cities by the sea�shore. What they probably did was to choose from the Egyptian characters, with which all the traders of the world must have been familiar, just so many phonetic or sound-carrying signs as represented the sounds of which speech is made up; and rejecting all others, they kept strictly to these chosen ones in all their future writings. This was a great work to have accomplished, and we must not suppose that it was done by one man, or even in one generation; as probably it took a very long time to perfect the separation between vowels and consonants: a distinction which had already been made by the ancient Egyptians, for they had vowel signs, though, as before remarked, they constantly made their con�sonants carry the vowels, and spelt words with the consonants alone. You will remember that consonants are the most important elements of language, and constitute, as we have said before, the bones of words; but also that distinctions of time, person, and case depended in an early stage of language on vowels; and you will therefore understand how important to clearness of expression it was to have a clearly defined separate sign for the vowels and diphthongs that had, so to speak, all the exactitude of meaning in their keeping. The Phoenicians, of all the people in the early world, were most in need of a clear and precise method of writing: for, being the great traders and settlers of ancient times, one of its principal uses would be to enable them to communicate with friends at a distance by means of writings which should convey the thoughts of the absent ones, or the private instructions of a trader to his partner without need of an interpreter.

The advantages of simplicity and clearness had been less felt by Egyptian priests while inscribing their stately records on walls of temples and palaces, and on the tapering sides of obelisks which were meant to lift sacred words up to the eye of Heaven rather than to expose them to those of men. They believed that a race of priests would continue, as long as the temples and obelisks continued, who could explain the writing to those worthy to enter into its mysteries; and they were not sorry, perhaps, to keep the distinction of understanding the art of letters to their own caste.

It was not till letters were needed by busy people, who had other things to do besides studying, that the necessity for making them easy to learn, and really effective as carriers of thought across distances, was sincerely felt. Two con�jectures as to the method pursued by the Phoenicians in choosing- theirletters and adapting them to their own language have been made by the learned. One is, that while they took the forms of their letters from the Egyptian system of signs, and adopted the principle of making each picture of an object stand for the first sound of its name, as labo for I; they did not give to each letter the value it had in the Egyptian alphabet, but allowed it to mean for them the first sound of its name in their own language. For example, they took the sign for an ox's head and made it stand for the sound a, not because it was one of the Egyptian signs for " a," but because Aleph was the name for an ox and " a " was its first syllable. This, which seems a natural method enough, is, however, not the method followed by the Japanese in choosing their alphabet from the Chinese signs; and more recent investigations prove such a close resemblance between the earliest forms of Phoenician letters, and early forms of signs for the same sounds in Hieratic character, that a complete descent in sound-bearing power, as well as in form, is now claimed for our letters from those hieroglyphics, which, in our ignorance of the relationship, we used to consider a synonymous term for something unintelligible. The Semitic language spoken by the Phoenicians was richer in sounds than the less developed language spoken by the ancient Egyptians; but as the Egyp�tians used several signs for each letter, the Phoenicians easily fell into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms originally identical, and thus provided for all the more delicate distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison of the forms of the letters of the earliest known Canaanite in�scriptions with Hieratic writing of the time of the Old Empire reveals a resemblance so striking between fifteen of the Phoenician letters and Hieratic characters carrying the same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one from the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their Hieratic counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, but experts in such investigations see sufficient likeness even there to confirn the theory.

The gradual divergence of the Phoenician characters from their Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the difference of the material and the instrument employed by the Phoenicians and Egyptians in writing. The Hieratic character was painted by Egyptian priests on smooth papyrus leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument on hard stone, and as a natural con�sequence the round curves of the Hieratic character become sharp points, and there is a general simplification of form and a throwing aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. The names given later to the Phoenician letters, Aleph, an "ox;" Beth, a "house;" Gimel, a "camel;" Daleth, a "door; "are not the names of the objects from which the forms of these letters were originally taken. The Hieratic " A " was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for " A" in hieroglyphics; "B " was originally a sort of heron; " D," a hand with the fingers spread out. New names were given by the Phoenicians to the forms they had borrowed, from fancied resemblances to objects which, in their language, began with the sound intended, when the original Egyptian names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a likeness between our letter " A" and an ox's horns with a yoke across; or between " B" and the ground-plan of a house; " G " and a camel's head and neck; " M " and water; " W " and a set of teeth; "P" and the back of a head set on the neck; but our letters have gone through a great deal of straightening and putting into order since they came into Europe and were sent out on their further westward travels. The reader who has an opportunity of examining early specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom of treatment which makes them much more suggestive of resemblances, and the earlier Phoenician letters were, no doubt, more pictorial still. The interesting and important thing to be remembered con�cerning our letters is that each one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and gets its shape in no other way than by having- once stood for an object, whose name in the ancient people's language began with the sound it conveys to us.

These Phoenician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian tombs older than Abraham, and selected by Phoenician traders who took their boats up to Memphis at or before Joseph's time, are the parents of all the alphabets now used in the world, with the exception of that one which the Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The Phoenicians carried their alphabet about with them to all the countries where they planted trading settlements, and it was adopted by Greeks and Latins, and gradually modified to suit the languages of all the civilized peoples of east and west. The Hebrew square letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and even the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be traced back to the same source by experts who have studied the transformations through which it has passed in the course of ages. It is, of course, easy to understand that these ubiquitous-little shapes which through so many centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words in so many different languages must have undergone some variations in their values to suit the tongues that interpreted them.

The original family of twenty letters have not always kept together, or avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of the languages they have had to express, heing in an early stage of development, have not wanted even so many as twenty letters, and have gradually allowed some of them to fall into disuse and be forgotten; an instance of this we find in the alphabet of the northern nations�the Gothic�which consisted only of sixteen runes�called by new names; they were most probably taken from the Phoenicians and furnished with mystic sayings belonging only to themselves.

In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called for than the original twenty Phoenician signs carried, a few fresh letters were added, but in no ease has any quite new form been invented. The added letters have always been a modification of one of the older forms�either a letter cut in half, or one modified by an additional stroke or dot. In this way the Romans made G out of C, by adding a stroke to one of its horns. T^and IT, I and J were originally slightly different ways of writing one letter, which had been taken advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity for a greater number of sound-signs arose. At first sight it seems a simple thing enough to invent a letter, but let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily-invented letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of nothing is a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem capable. Every single letter in use anywhere (we can hardly dwell on this thought too long) has descended in regular steps from the pictured object in whose name the sound it represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and all the labor bestowed on them since has only been in the way of modification and adaptation to changed circumstances. Xo wonder that, when people believed a whole alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also thought that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, with his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; Oannes, the Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the under-world lay open; Swift Hermes, with his cap of invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin, while his dearly-purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him still. Xo one indeed�as we see plainly enough now�but a hero like one of these, was equal to the task of inventing an alphabet.

Before we have quite done with alphabets, I ought to mention another system of ancient writing, the cuneiform; which, though it has left no trace of itself on modern alphabets, is the vehicle which preserves some of the most interesting and ancient records in the world. The cuneiform or arrow-shaped character used by the ancient Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form to the material on which it was habitually graven by those who employed it. It arose in a country where the temples were built of unburned brick instead of stone, and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the letters is precisely what would be most easily produced on wet clay by the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a blunt-pointed stick or reed. Like all other systems, it began in rude pictures, which gradually came to have a phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are graven on the unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, which a little before the time of Abraham began to be built by a nation composed of mixed Shemite, Cushite, and Scythian peoples round the shores of the Persiaji Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed in the records to the Scythian race, who are always designated by the sign of a wedge, which was equivalent to calling them the writers, or the literary people. It is perhaps allowable to conjecture that the Scythian invention terminated with the notion of depicting objects by means of wedge-shaped lines, and using them for picture-writing, such as the Chinese (also a Turanian people) invented, as you will remember, so early, that their language was checked in its progress of development by the premature discovery. The subsequent unfolding and application of the invention belonged to the Shemites. In theirTiands it became the vehicle in which the history of the two great empires of Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of ancient Persian kings, have come down to us. We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing on the Assyrian marbles in the British Museum, and stood in awe before the human-headed monster gods�

" Their flanks with dark runes fretted o'er,"

whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and being^- brought from so far to enlighten us on the history of past ages, can never cease to astonish us. When we look at them again, let us spare a thought to the history of the character itself. Its mysteries have cost even greater labor to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest times of the use of cuneiform by the Seleucidas, pictorial, symbolic, and phonetic groups continued to be mixed together, and a system of determinative signs was employed to show the reader in what sense each word was to be taken. The symbolism, too, is very complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used phonetically is greatly increased by the fact of the lan�guage from which they acquired their values (a Turanian one) being different from the Semitic tongue, in which the most important records are written.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

At this point, where we are bringing our inquiries to a con�clusion, we would feign look a little nearer into the mists which shroud the past, and descry, were it possible, the actual dawn of history for the individual nations�see not onlv how the larger bodies of men have travelled through the pre-historic stages of their journey, but how, having reached their settled home, each people begins to emerge from the obscurity that surrounds its early days. What were the exact means, we ask, wherebv a collection of nomadic or half-nomadic tribes separ�ated, reunited, separated again, and developed upon different soils the qualities which distinguish them from all others ? What is, in fact, the beginning of real national life ?

The worlds which circle round our sun, or rather, the multitudinous systems of orbs which fill space, might pose a like inquiry. There was a time when these which are now distinct worlds were confounded as continuous nebulas, a thin vapor of matter whirling round in one unchanging circle. In time, their motion became less uniform, vortices� as the word is;�set in, smaller bodies of vaporous matter which, obeying the universal movement, set up internal motions among themselves, and cooling, separated into separate orbs. How like is all this to the history of nations. These, conformed once together in one unstable mass of wandering tribes, have in like manner separated from their nebulous brethren, and, setting up their internal vortices, have coalesced

into nations. And yet as a system of planets, albeit with their own distinctive motions, do all revolve in one direction round one central force, so the different families of nations, which we may call the planets of a system, seem in like manner com�pelled by a power external to themselves in one particular course to play a particular part in the world's history. The early stone age Turanians, the Cushite civilizers of Egypt and Chaldaea, the Semitic people, may all be looked upon as dif�ferent systems of nations, each with their mission to t he human race; and thus the Aryan people, after they had become so separated as to lose all family remembrance, are found work�ing together to finish an assigned destiny, migrating in every direction, and carrying with them everywhere the seeds of a higher civilization.

If we desire to get any idea of the process by which the separation of the Aryan people became completed, we must put quite upon one side the idea of a nation as we see it now. Now, when we speak the word, we think of a political unit subject to one government, stationary, and confined within pretty exact limits of space. But very different was the nation during the process of its foundation; there was scarcely any political unity among them, their homes were unfixed, the members constantly shifting and changing combinations, like those heaps of sand we see carried along in a cyclone. Let us then forget out political atlases, with their different colors and well-marked boundaries, and think not of the inanimate adjunct of a nation, the soil on which it happens to dwell, but of the nation as the men of whom it is made up. The earliest things we discern are those vortices set up in the midst of a homogeneous people, an attractive power somewhere in the midst of them which draws them into closer fellowship. Jt acts like the attractive power of a crystal in selecting from any of the surrounding matters the fragments most suited to its proper formation. Thus the earliest traditions of a people are generally the history of some individual tribe from which the whole nation feigns itself descended; either because of its actual pre-eminence from the beginning, the power it had of drawing other tribes to share its fortunes, or because, out of many tribes drawn together by some common interest or sen�timent, the bards of later days selected this one tribe from among the others, and adopted its traditions for their own. If we remember this, much that would otherwise appear a hopeless mass of contradiction and ambiguity is capable of receiving a definite meaning.

The first rays of European history shine upon the island-dotted sea and bounding coasts of the .iEgean. Here sprang into life the Greek people, who have left behind so splendid a legacy of art and philosophy. These, as has been already said, made their entry into Europe traversing the southern shores of the Euxine, along which passed, still as one people, the ancestors of the Greeks and the Italians. The former, at all events, seem to have delayed long upon their route, and it was upon these shores, or perhaps rather in the table�land of ancient Phrygia, that first began the separation of two races who reunited to form the Greek nation. Some, the older race, the Pelasgi, made their way to the Hellespont, and by that route into European Greece; the others, the Ionians as they subsequently became, passed onward to the sea-shore of Asia Minor, and, tempted no doubt by the facilities of the voy�age, crossed from this mainland to the neighboring islands, which lie so thickly scattered over the .dSgean that the mari�ner passing from shore to shore of Asiatic and European Greece need never on his voyage lose sight of land. They did not, however, find these islands deserted, or occupied by savages only. The Phoenicians had been there beforehand, as they were beforehand upon almost every coast in Europe, and had made mercantile stations and established small colonies for the purposes of trading with the Pelasgi of Greece. The adven�turous Ionians were thus brought early into contact with the advanced civilization of Asia, and from this source gained in all probability a knowledge of navigation, letters, and some of the Semitic mythical legends. Thus while the mainland Greeks had altered little of the primitive culture, the germs of a Hellenic civilization, of a Hellenic life, were being fos�tered in the islands of the ^Egean. We see this reflected in many Greek myths; in the legend, for example, of Minos and his early Cretan kingdom, in the myth of Aphrodite springing from the sea by Cythera, and in the worship of Phoebus Apollo which sprang up in Delos. Legend spoke of two Minoi, one, the legislator of Crete, representative of all that was most ancient in national polity, and for that reason transferred to be the judge of souls in Hell; the second, he who made war against the Athenians, and compelled them to pay their dreadful yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be devoured of the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. Until Theseus came. No doubt the two Minoi are but amplifications of one being, who, whether mythical or historical, is an echo in the memory of Greeks of the still older Cretan kingdom. In both tales Minos has a dreadful aspect; perhaps because this "Lord of the Isles" had been inimical to the early growing communities of the mainland.

The myths of Aphrodite and Apollo have been already commented upon as enfolding within them the history of their origin. Aphrodite is essentially an Asiatic divinity; she springs to life in a Phoenician colony. But Phoebus Apollo is before all things the god of the Ionian Greeks; and as their first national life begins in the islands, his birth too takes place in one of these, the central one of all, Delos. In Homer, Delos, or Ortygia, is feigned to be the central spot of the earth.

Thus the Greeks were from the beginning a commercial people. Before their history began, there is proof that they had established a colony in the Delta of the Nile; and the frequent use of the word Javan in the Bible�which here stands for Ionians�shows how familiar was their name to the dwellers in Asia. Wherever these mariners came in contact with their brethren of the continent they excited in them the love of adventure, and planted the germs of a new life, so that it was under their paramount influence that these primitive Greeks began to coalesce from mutually hostile tribes into nations. In northern Greece it was that the gathering together of tribes and cities first began. These confederations were always based primarily upon religious union, the protection of a common deity, a union to protect and support a common shrine. They were called Amphicty-onies, confederations of neighbors, a name which lived long in the history of Greece. These amphictyonies seem first to have arisen in the north. Here too the words Hellenic, Hellenes, first spring up as national epithets. Hellas never extended farther north than the north of Thessaly, and was naturally marked off from foreign countries by Olympia and Pierus. But the term spread southwards till it embraced all Greek-speaking lands to the extremity of the peninsula, and over the islands of the Aegean, and the coast of Asia Minor, on to the countless colonies 'which issued from Greek shores; for Hellas was not a geographical term, it included all the peoples of true Hellenic speech, and distinguished them from the barbaroi, the " babblers," of other lands.

The two great nations of the Gneco-Italic family kept up some knowledge of each other after they had forgotten the days of their common life, and, strange to say, in days before either of the two races had come to regard itself as a distinct people, each was so regarded by the other. The Italians classed the Greeks in the common name of Graeci or Graii, and the Greeks bestowed the name of "Oirucos upon the nation of the Italians. It is curious to reflect upon the different destinies which lay ahead of these two .races, who came under such similar conditions into their new homes. Whether it were through some peculiarity in their national character, or a too rapid civilization, or the too great influences of a changeful character and adventurous life, the Greeks never welded properly together the units of their race; the Italians through a much slower process of integration lived to weld their scattered fragments into the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.

This second half, then, of the Graeco-Italic family, crossing the Hellespont like (or with) the first dwellers in Greece proper, proceeded onwards until, skirting the shores of the Adriatic, they found ont a second peninsula, whose fertile plains tempted them to dispute the possession of the land with the older inhabitants. Who were these older inhabi�tants ? In part they must have been those lake-dwellers of northern Italy to whom reference was made in our second chapter, and who were evidently closely allied to the stone-age men of Switzerland: but besides these we have almost no trace of the men who were dispossessed by the Italic tribes, and these last who pushed to the farthest extremity of the peninsula must have completely absorbed, or completely exterminated, the aborigines. The process by which the Italians spread over the land is altogether hidden from us. Doubtless their several seats were not assigned to the different branches at once, or without bloodshed. Though still no more than separate tribes, we are able to divide the primitive Italicans into stocks of which the southern most resembled the ancient type of the Pelasgic family; those in the centre formed the Latin group; while north of these lay the Etrus�cans, the most civilized of all the three. At this time the tribes seem to have acknowledged no common bond, nothing corresponding to the word Hellenic had sprung up to unite their interests: existence was as yet to the strongest only. And while the laud was in this chaotic state, one tribe, or small confederacy of tribes, among the Latin people began to assert its pre-eminence. We see them dimly looming through a cloud of fable, daring, warlike, unscrupulous in their dealings with their neighbors, firm in their allegiance to each other. This tribe gradually increased in strength and proportions till, from being a mere band of robbers defending themselves within their rude fortifications, they grew in the traditions of their descendants, and of the other tribes whom in course of time they either subdued or absorbed, to be regarded as the founders of Rome. They did not accomplish their high destiny without trials and reverses. More power�ful neighboring kingdoms looked on askance during the days of their rise, and found opportunity more than once to over�throw their city and all but subdue their state. Their former brethren, the Kelts,who had been beforehand of all the Aryan races in entering Europe, and now formed the most powerful people in this quarter of the globe, several times swept down upon them like a devastating storm. But after each reverse the infant colony arose with renewed Antaean vigor.

Thus in Italy, the development from the tribal to the na�tional state was internal. No precocious maritime race awoke in many different centres the seeds of nationality; rather this nationality was a gradual growth from one root, the slow response to a central attractive force. The energy of Rome did not g^-o out in sea adventure, or in the colonization of distant lands; but it was firmly bound to absorb the different people of her own peninsula, people of like blood with herself, but in every early stage of culture from an almost nomadic condition to one of considerable advancement in the arts of peace.

When from the Greeks and Romans we turn to the Kelts and Teutons, we must descend much lower in the records of his�tory before we can get any clear glimpse at these. The Kelts, who were probably the first Aryans in Europe, seem gradually

to have been forced farther and farther west by the incur�sions of other peoples. At one time, however, we have evidence that they extended eastward, at least as far as the Rhine, and over all that northern portion of Italy�now Lombardy and part of Sardinia�which to the Romans went by the name of Cisalpine GauL The long period of subjec�tion to the Roman rule which Gaul experienced, obliterated in that country all traces of its early Keltic manners, and we are reduced for our information concerning these to the pages of Roman historians, or to the remains of Keltic laws and customs preserved in the western homes of the race. The last have only lately received a proper attention. The most primitive Irish code�the Brehon laws�has been searched for traces of the primitive Keltic life. From both our sources we gather that the Kelts were divided into tribes regarded as members of one family. These clans were ruled over by chiefs, whose offices were hereditary, or very early became so. They were thus but slightly advanced out of the most primi�tive conditions,�they cannot be described as a nation. Had they been so, extensive and warlike as they were, they would have been capable of subduing all the other infant nationalities of Aryan folk. As it was, as mere combinations of tribes under some powerful chieftain (Caesar describes just such), they gave trouble to the Roman armies even under a Caesar, and were in early days the most dreadful enemies of the Republic. Under Brennus, they besieged and took Rome, sacked the city, and were only induced to retire on the payment of a heavy ransom. A hundredyears later, under another Brennus, they made their way into Thrace, ravaged the whole country, and from Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, obtained a settlement in Asia Minor in the district which from them received the name of Galatia. The occurrence of those two names Brennus shows us that this could hardly have been a mere personal name. It is undoubtedly the Celtic Brain, a king or chieftain, the same from which we get the mythic Bran,and in all pro�bability the Irish O'Brien. The recognition of the Celtic fighting capacity in the ancient world is illustrated by another circumstance, and this is more especially interesting to us of the modern world, whose army is so largely made up of Kelts from Ireland and Scotland (Highlanders). Hieron I., the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, founded his despotism, as he afterwards confessed, chiefly upon the 30,000 Gaulish mer�cenaries whom he kept in pay.

For the rest, we know little of the internal Keltic life and of the extent of its culture. Probably this differed con�siderably in different parts, in Gaul for instance, and in Ireland. The slight notices of Gaulish religion which Csesar gives refer chiefly to its external belongings, to the hereditary sacerdotal class, who seem also to have been the bardic class; of its myths and of their real significance we know little more than what can be gathered by analogy of other nations. We may assert that their nature-worship approached most nearly to the Teutonic form among those of all the Aryan peoples.

Peculiarly interesting to us are such traces as can be gleaned of the Teutonic race. The first time that they show themselves upon the stage of History is in company with the Kelts, if indeed the Teutones, who in company with the Cimbri, the Tigurini and the Ambrones were defeated by Marius (b.c. 101) were really Teutons. The second of these four names is the same with the still extant Cymri (pro�nounced Cumri), the native name of the Welsh, who are of course Kelts; so that, if this be the first appearance of Germans, we find them in company with the Kelts. What branch of the German family (if any) the Teutones were, is quite uncertain. Again, in the pages of Caesar we meet with several names of tribes evidently of German origin. The Treviri, the Marcornanni (Mark men, men of the march or boundary), Allemanni (all-men, or men of the great or the mixed nation), the Suevi (Suabians), the Cherusci�men of the sword, perhaps the same as iSa.vons, whose name has the same meaning.

It is not till after the death of Theodosius at the end of the fourth century of our era that the Germans fill a conspicuous place on the historical canvas. By this time they had come to be divided into a number of different nations, similar in most of the elements of their civilization and barbarism, closely allied in languages, but politically unconnected, or even opposed.

Most of these Teutonic peoples grew into mighty nations and deeply influenced the future of European history. It is there�fore right that we pass them rapidly in review. 1. The Goths had beeu long settled in the region of the Lower Danube, chiefly in the country called Mcesia, where Ulfilas, a Gothic prince who had been converted to Christianity, returned to preach to his countrymen, became a bishop among them, and by his translation of the Bible into their tongue, the Mceso-Gothic, has left a perpetual memorial of the language. During the reign of Honorius, the son of Theodosius, a portion of this nation, the West- or Visi-goths, quitted their home and undertook under Alaric (All-king) their march into Italy, thrice besieged and finally took Rome. Then turning aside, they founded a powerful kingdom in the south of Gaul and in Spain. A century later the East-Goths (Ostro-Goths), under the great Theodoric (People's-king) again invaded Italy and founded an Ostrogothic kingdom upon the ruins of the Western Empire. 2, 3, 4,5. The Suevi, Alani, Burgundians, and Vandals crossed the Rhine in 405, and entered Roman territory never again to return to whence they came. The Burgundians (City-men) fixed their abode in east-central Gaul (Burgundy and Switzerland), where their kingdom lasted till it was subdued by the Franks; but the other three passed on into Spain, and the Vandals (Wends) from Spain into Africa, where they founded a kingdom. 6. The Franks, (Free-men) having been for nearly a century settled between the Meuse and the Scheldt, began under Clovis (Chlodvig, BQudwig, Lewis,) (480 a.d.) their career of victory, from which they did not rest until the whole of Gaul owned the sway of Merovingian kings. 7. The Longobardi (Long-beards, or men of the long horde, long stretch of alluvial land), who after the Ostrogoths had been driven out of Italy by the Emperor of the East, founded in defiance of his power a second Teutonic kingdom in that country, a kingdom which lasted till the days of Charlemagne. 8. And last, but we may safely say not least, the Saxons (Sword-men, from seava, a sword) who invaded Britain, and under the name of Angles founded the nation to which we belong, the longest lived of all those which rose upon the ruins of the Roman Empire.

CONCLUSION.

The condition of the German people, even so late as the time when they began their invasion of the Roman territory, was far behind that of the majority of their Aryan fellows, It is likely that they were little more civilized than the Greeks and Romans were, in days when they lived together as one people. For the moment when we catch sight of these�the Greeks and Romans�in their new homes, we see them settled agriculturists, with no trace left of their wandering habits. It was not so with the Teutons : they knew agriculture cer�tainly, they had known it before they separated from the other peoples of the European family (for the Greek and Latin words for plough reappear in Teutonic speech), but they had not altogether bid adieu to their migratory life; we see them still flowing in their nebulous condition into the Roman lands. Even the Tartars of our day�the very picture of a nomadic people�practise some form of agriculture. They plant buckwheat, which, growing up in a few months, allows them to reap the fruits of their industry without tying them long to a par�ticular spot. The Teutons were more stationary than the Tartars, but doubtless they too were constantly shifting their homes�choosing fresh homesteads, as Tacitus says they did, wherever any spot or grove or stream attracted them. The condition of society called the village community, which has been described in a former chapter, though long abandoned by the cultivated Greeks and Romans, was still suitable to the exigencies of their life; but these exigencies imposed upon it some fresh conditions. Their situation, the situation of those who made their way into the western countries of Europe, was essentially that of conquerors ; for they must keep in sub�jection the original inhabitants, whether Romans or Celts ; and so all their social arrangements bent before the primary necessity of an effective war footing. Age and wisdom were of less value to the community than youthful vigor. The patriarchal chief, chosen for his reputation for wisdom and swaying by his mature counsels the free assemblies of the states, gives place with them to the leader, famous for his valor and fortunes in the field, by virtue of which he exacts a more implicit obedience than would be accorded in unwarlike times, until by degrees his office becomes hereditary ; the partition of the conquered soil among the victors, and the holding of it upon conditions of military service, conditions which led so easily to the assertion of a principle of primogeniture, and thence, by slow but natural stages, to the conditions of tenure known as feudal; these are the marks of the early Teutonic society.

Such germs of literary life as they had were enshrined in the ballads, such as all nations possess in some form. The re-echoes of these have come down to us in the earliest known poems by men of Teutonic race, all of which are unfortunately of very recent date. All are distinguished by the principle of versifying which is essentially Teutonic; the trusting of the cadence, not to an exact measurement of syllables or quantities, but to the pauses or beats of the voice in repetition, the effect of these beats being heightened by the use of alliteration. Poems of this true Teutonic character are the elder (or Scemund's) "Edda" in the Icelandic, our Saxon poem " Beowulf " and the " Bard's Tale," and one or two Low German ballads, the most celebrated of which, though one of the latest, is the "Nibelungen lied." These poems repeat the old mythic legends which had for centuries been handed down from father to son, and display the mythology and religion of our German ancestors, such as in a former chapter we endeavored to sketch them out. Slight as they are, they are of inestimable value, in that they help us to read the mind of heathen Germany, and to weigh the significance of the last great revolution in Europe's history, a revolution wherein we through our ancestors have taken and through ourselves are still taking part, and in which we have therefore so close an interest.

But having carried the reader down to this point, our task oomes to an end. Even for Europe, the youngest born as it were in the world's history, when we have passed the epoch of Teutonic invasion, the star of history sera rubens has definitely risen. Nations from this time forward emerge more and more into light, and little or nothing falls to the part of prehistoric study.

 

AUTHORITIES.

�Dawkins, Cave hunting, researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe 

Evans, Stone Implements of Great Britain.

Geikie, The Great Ice Age.

�Lyell, Antiquity of Man The geological evidences of the antiquity of man, with an outline of glacial and post-tertiary geology and remarks in the origin of species, with special reference to man's first appearance on the earth

Lubbock, Prehistoric Times.

Tylor, Early History of Mankind.

Tylor, Primitive culture researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom

Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language.

Peile, Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology. .

Bunsen, Egypt�s Place in the world,

Legge, Chinese Classics, with Introduction,

Lenormant, Manual of the Ancient History of the East.

Pickering, Races of Man.

Rawlinson, Herodotus,.

�������������������� Five Great Monarchies

Nasse, Agricultural Community