near enough to bite the moon, and that is an eclipse. The sun, as men may still see, devours her stars at dawn, but the moon hides hers all day while the sun is near, and brings them out at night only, when the sun is far away.

The names still in use for certain clusters of stars and single stars, were given long ago when the stars were thought to be living creatures. They were said to be men who had once lived here, or to be mighty hunters or groups of young men and maidens dancing. Many of the names given show that the stars were watched with anxiety by the farmer and sailor, who thought they ruled the weather. The group of stars known to us as the Pleiades were so called from the word plein, which means to sail, because the old Greek sailors watched for their rising before they ventured on the ocean. The same stars are called the digging stars by the Zulus, who live in South Africa, because when they appear the people begin to dig. A very good illustration of the change which a myth takes is afforded by these same stars, which are spoken of in

Greek mythology as the seven daughters of Atlas (who was said to bear the world on his shoulders), six of whom were wedded to the gods, but the seventh to a king, for which reason Merope, as she is named, shines the faintest of them all.

The stars were formerly believed to govern the fate of a person in life. The temper was said to be good or bad, the nature grave or gay, according to the planet which was in the ascendant, as it was called, at birth. Several words in our language witness to this old belief. We speak of a "disaster," which means the stroke or blast of an unlucky star; aster being a Greek word for star. We call a person "ill-starred" or "born under a lucky star." Grave and gloomy people are called "saturnine," because those born under the planet Saturn were said to be so disposed. Merry and happy-natured people are called "jovial,” as born under the planet Jupiter or Jove. Active and sprightly people are called " mercurial," as born under the planet Mercury. Mad people are called "lunatics." Luna is the Latin

word for moon, and the more sane movements of the insane were believed to depend upon her phases or appearances of change in form.

Sun, moon, and stars were all thought to be fixed to the great heaven (which means heaved or lifted up, and comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, hefan, to lift), because it seemed like a solid arch over the flat earth. To many a mind it was the place of bliss, where care and want and age could never enter. The path to it was said to be along that bright-looking band across the sky known to us as the "Milky Way," the sight of which has given birth to several beautiful myths. I should like to stay and tell you some of them, but we must not let the myths keep us too long from the realities.

XXII. Myths about the Earth and Man.

The waterspout was thought to be a giant or sea-serpent reaching from sea to sky; the rainbow (which books about light will tell you is a circle, half only of which we can see) was said to be a living demon coming down to drink when the rain fell, or, prettier myth, the heaven

ladder or bridge along which the souls of the blest are led by angels to Paradise, or the bow of God set in the clouds, as Indian, Jew, and Fin have called it; the clouds were COWS driven by the children of the morning to their pasture in the blue fields of heaven; the tides were the beating of the ocean's heart; the earthquake was caused by the Earth-Tortoise moving underneath; the lightning was the forked tongue of the storm-demon, the thunder was his roar; volcanoes were the dwelling-places of angry demons who threw up red-hot stones from them.

Man's sense of the wonderful is so strong that a belief in giants and pigmies and fairies was as easy to him as it has been hard to remove. The bones of huge beasts now extinct were said to have belonged to giants, whose footprints were left in those hollows in stones which we know to be water-worn. The big

loose stones were said to have been torn from the rocks by the giants and hurled at their foes in battle. The stories of the very small people who once lived in this part of Europe, and whose descendants now live in Lapland, gave rise to a

belief in dwarfs. The flint arrow-heads of the Stone Age were said to be elf-darts used by the little spirits dwelling in woods and wild places, while the polished stone axes were thunderbolts!

How all kinds of other myths, such as those accounting for the bear's stumpy tail, the robin's red breast, the crossbill's twisted bill, the aspen's quivering leaf, arose, I cannot now stay to tell you, nor how out of myths there grew the nursery stories and fairy tales which children never tire of hearing; for we must now be starting on our voyage from the wonderful realm of fancy to the not less wonderful land of fact whither science is ever bearing us. Nay, not less wonderful but more wonderful, since the fancies come from the facts, not the facts from the fancies.

XXIII. Man's Ideas about the Soul.

We have learnt that because man saw all nature to be in motion, he believed that life dwelt in all, that a spirit moved leaf and cloud and beast. Words now come in to tell us what in the course of time was man's notion