stolidness of human ears, and could the murmur of its living maelstroms, as they whirl and circle in the numberless myriads of cells which constitute every separate tree and plant be caught, human ears would be stunned as by the roar of a great city. So here is a myth which, having come down through ages, finds at last a scientific basis in the fact that all protoplasmic bodies, like the stinging-hair of the common 'nettle, are, however minute, bodies with an ever restless internal circulation; and since it has been proved that color, like sound, consists of undulating waves, so that it is possible to set the spectrum of the one to the gamut of the other, may not human ears become sensitive enough by and by to hear color as well as see it? May not the minute wave-motions that condition the forms of plants and the undulations of its odor-waves become audible by-and-by, so that a blossom shall appeal to the ear as a delicious blending of the melodies of color, of form, and of odor? Sir Francis Bacon intimates that he had a certain perception of music blended with the sensation of odor, and never entered a room pervaded with the latter without fancying himself walking through waves of melody; and why may not anybody else scent music in a lily or a rose, and even discriminate between the tunes which different blossoms play in the exhalation of perfumes. Herbert Spencer has proved that all activities whatsoever fall naturally into waves of rhythm; and thus the cosmos was a poet long before man thought of rhyming.

After the promulgation of the Copernican system of astronomy, which was printed at Nuremberg in 1543, a period of two centuries elapses, in which observation takes the place of myth-fabrication. A renaissance of the mythical spirit occurs about the middle of the eighteenth century, and Kant anticipates the nebular hypothesis-La Place's splendid myth-in the bold and startling speculations of his Theorie des Himmels, which the latter reproduces in many respects in his Système du Monde. Newton's magnificent discoveries are already public property. So Galileo's; so Kepler's. Copernicus's have been struggling for mastery over the old cosmical myth with which primitive man set out, for over two centuries.

Galileo, Newton, Kepler and Brahe have one after another picked up the hammer of Thor and hammered away at the myth of ages, which has at last been beaten to powder.

The world must have a new cosmogony adapted to Newtonian principles. Presto, from the heads of two men -one a dreamer of Sweden and the other a philosopher of Germany-spring two Minervas of cosmogony. Kant says, "Give me matter and I will build the world." Beginning with a formless waste of nebulous blastema, he supposes a single centre of attraction, which develops a prodigious central body, encompassed about with systems of planetary worlds-a world-maelstrom whirling in the midst of still unreclaimed masses of vapor and molecular waste. Millions on millions of ages the great maelstrom expands its margins, converting blastema into cosmos, but losing at the centre what it gains at the margin: the attractions of the central systems bringing their constituents together again in a. continuous crash of matter and wreck of worlds. Thus the worlds that are now circle in a prodigious ring of cosmos between the wreck of the central worlds that have been and the molecular waste of the worlds to be hereafter. Like La Place, Kant accounts for all the then discovered phenomena of astronomy, even to the zodiacal light.

Thus, in 1755, the principle of gravitation has resulted, in the hands of Immanuel Kant, in a splendid myth of cosmogony, more daring in its way, more tremenduous in its cycles of creation and destruction than any of which Greek, Hindoo, Goth or Egyptian ever dreamed; equally mythical, too, because equally vague and speculative in its magnificent mazes of guess-work.

Contemporary with the German thinker, the Swedish dreamer Swedenborg, also an Emmanuel, fabricates a strange, Gothic cosmogony. In this second myth the cosmos is the body of God, and hence a vast anthropomorphic universe. God's body being shaped like a man's, the universe is consequently a vast man-shaped body, every atom of which is a solar system. In a word, the universe is God's body, which is seen by the angels in heaven, as having the sun for its right

eye and the moon for its left. Not far from contemporaneous with both was Dr. Whiston's myth relative to the function of comets, in which those eccentric bodies are given over to the habitation of lost souls. Kant's myth, in the slightly modified form of La Place's nebular hypothesis, has represented the prevalent opinion of astronomers for over a century; but how soon the progress of physical discovery may render its abrogation necessary, and let it drop into the great waste-basket of the past, it would be the height of temerity to attempt to predict..

The two middle decades of the last century seem to have been given over to myth-building. The illustrious physiologists Harvey and Francisco Redi were busy with the demolition of the myth of spontaneous generation. Equally busy were Benoit de Maillet, the author of Tilliamed, and Lamarck, the author of the Philosophie Zoologique, in the construction of the new myth of the transmutation of species, out of which has since been developed the compact system of Darwin, and a new myth in Professor Kölliker's odd fiction of heterogeneous generation. Cuvier was just then in the zenith of his fame as a comparative anatomist, and Buffon was cogitating his myth of organic molecules, which Professor Huxley has since metamorphosed into the protoplasmic theory of organic genesis.

According to Lamarck—of the two the abler exponent of the new myth-all species of animals result from the indirect action of alterations of circumstances on the primitive germs which he regards as having originated by spontaneous generation in the waters of the globe; thus travestying the primitive myth embalmed in hexameters by the Latin poet. Lamarck rested his myth upon the substratum of a reasoning like this. Organs are increased, he says, by action, atrophied by inaction. Hence, alterations of circumstance produce organic alteration by increasing the activity of some organs, and lessening that of others; and organic alterations are transmissible as hereditary properties. Of the struggle for existence so strongly insisted upon by Darwin, Lamarck had no idea. Nor had de Maillet, nor Robinet, whose speculations are crude in com

parison with de Maillet's-cruder still in comparison with the Philosophie Zoologique. Man was a baboon modified by alterations of circumstances. So on and so on ran the myth, ending at last in primitive germs far down the millioncolumned vista of geologic centuries.

Dead myths lie all along the track of the Hercules of physical discovery; and at last discovery kills-strangles and casts into the waste-box-the long prevalent doctrines of progressive modification, through ages, from more to less embryonic forms. Myth more generally accepted, with the exception of Kant's Theorie des Himmels, has not been propounded since the days of the universally accepted fictions of humanity primitive. But an impartial survey of the positively ascertained facts of palæontology negatives these doctrines irrevocably. So witnesses Professor Huxley in his "Persistent Types of Life."

Of those dead, one of the strangest and most fantastic was the myth of the phlogiston supposed to inhabit metals. Just as really mythical it was as were the more ancient fictions of the dryads, fauns and other weird volitions moving the cogs and pulleys of all natural phenomena. The metal-spirit has long since ceased to exist, having been superseded by more scientific forms of personification.

Yet the myth of the phlogiston occasioned the discovery of oxygen. Previous to the experiments of Eck de Sulzback, it had been held that metals were inhabited by a sort of spirit which, being set free by heat, made them lighter when cooled, by re-entering their bodies, which were heavier when heated, owing to the exhalation of the inhabiting spiritual phlogiston. Sulzback murdered this myth by proving that the augmentation in the weight of metals subjected to heat, was not occasioned by an escaping spirit; but that the fixed ashes, as he termed the oxides, were formed by the union of a spirit with the body of the metal. This was Sulzback's philosophy of oxidation; and he went on to say that artificial cinnabar--his term for the red oxide of mercury-released this spirit when heated, and that, the spirit having a certain weight, the cinnabar became lighter in consequence. Doubtless, the now antiquated

experimenter's idea that spirit had weight, was, at that day, denounced and deprecated as heterodox; for it had been held for ages that spirit possessed a certain tendency to ascend which lessened the dead gravity of matter with which it was connected. Thus, when the phlogiston left the metal, the metal became heavier, having lost the buoyancy occasioned by its spiritual presence. In like manner, and for the same reason, a dead body was regarded as heavier than a living, that is, a corpse was thought to weigh more than its person had weighed as a living organism-to which myth is no doubt referable the origin of the phrase, "dead weight." Sulzback's investigations impugned this once popular and, in some quarters, still believed superstition; and were, hence, in their day, as heterodox as Francisco Redis in his. Had Sulzback called this spirit oxygen, the elimination of the myth would have been completed. But for more than a century combustion was supposed to be fed by an attendant spirit. In 1501, Cardoni speaks of the spirit that feeds the fire; but, in 1602, the world has come to the conclusion that the drop that covers the surface of heated lead is of atmospheric origin; and, just as the sun of the seventeenth century was shooting red rays up the east, Jean Rey proved by experiment that contact with the air was a condition of oxidation. At last, in 1774, Priestley enacted the old experiment of burning out the spirit from cinnabar; which Sulzback had enacted 300 years before him. But Sulzback called it a spirit, and made no attempt to imprison it as a consequence; while Priestley caught it in a pneumatic trough, and named it oxygen; and thus Cardoni's spirit that fed the fire was identical with the gas that supports combustion. Thus, too, the medieval myth of phlogiston was transmuted into the scientific fact of oxygen.

The present century has produced a few myths worthy of mention. In the infancy of photography was developed the fiction that the likeness of the murderer might always be found photographed in the eye of his victim. Several novels introduced the idea by way of bringing the hypothetical murderer to the hypothetical justice of the novelist; and, notwithstanding the idea could only have originated with some person