Surely not an unreasonable claim. And now, my rich brother, will you not prove to our brother Lazarus that you are not Dives, by no longer treating him as if you were Dives? Raising him from his dire distress will not lower you. For though you stand, oh, Society, take heed lest you fall. If your welfare is based on the misery of Lazarus, you will fall. It will be wise and not unworthy to heed the appeal of Lazarus, to your self-interest. It is nonsense to talk about self-interest being an unworthy motive, for the punishment of wrong-doing and the reward of righteous doing is the Divine Law. For your own sake, then, my rich brother, no longer treat Lazarus as if you were Dives. But also you, as a Christian, have the highest motive to treat Lazarus as your brother, and you do not so treat him while you are clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day, and he, your brother Lazarus, abides in putrid, festering, and leprous misery. Will not the leprosy of his body make your soul leprous? If you say that you love Lazarus as your brother, that you care for the salvation of his soul, and yet you leave him to abide in dire and corrupting distress, your profession of affection is utterly false.

What can you do? Lazarus does not ask for alms, but for the relief he holds himself entitled to—that is, he claims a living share of the necessaries and comforts of life. I do not mean that he rejects your alms, and the prompt relief of distress, as far as it can be promptly relieved, is your bounden duty. But Lazarus is not satisfied with the position of a crumb-fed beggar who is just kept alive, whose mortal misery is prolonged by the doles of the rich. The profusest almsgiving does very little even to alle viate the misery of the Million. My rich brother, if you gave all your goods to the poor it would not be an excuse

for not doing what can be done to render almsgiving unnecessary.

What can you do? Will you tell Lazarus that though God has made the earth abundantly fruitful, yet many, very many, must needs suffer from privation? Will you tell him that his shameful misery is irremediable, because it is not man's fault? You will not pollute your lips with such blasphemy. Then what can you do? Consider and consult as to what can be tried to overcome the evil. There is the distress, and how can it be remedied and hereafter prevented? How can the organization of Society be so reformed that all men, even Lazarus, will have a living share of the necessaries and comforts of life?

If you convince yourself that it is your most solemn duty to spare no effort to remedy the evil I doubt not that you will succeed. I have spoken of stores of water, but a lack of distribution causes famine, and hence irrigation works are necessary. Even in our towns, what would become of the dense population, if the stores of water were not distributed by water works? Well, what you have to do is to devise means for the more efficient distribution of all the necessaries and comforts of life. My rich brother, you will not be impoverished by the boon conferred on Lazarus. Nay, you will be in every way further enriched by the prosperity of Lazarus. The prosperity of the Million pays tribute to the wealth of the few. Let it then be the aim of your politics to redeem Lazarus from his dire distress, and to reform the organization and laws of Society so that the Million and the Million and the Million will have a living share of the necessaries and comforts of life. If there are any theories of political economy that are antagonistic to such reform, consign those parts of your political economy to Saturn or to Satan. My rich brother, the tolerance of the dire distress of Lazarus is Satanic.

The present message of Lazarus to you, whom he calls Dives, and, as I have said, you may well forgive him for so doing when you think of the soreness of his sores, is an appeal :—' Give me for my body's sake and my soul's

are wolves, lions, scorpions, lyres, and the rest seen in arrangements of stars that have not the least resemblance to the things after which they are named? Did astronomers resort to those figures for the more convenient mapping out of the heavens, or did they accept traditional names handed down from a time when all the forms of life figured in the heavens were really thought to be embodied in the stars?

The latter alternative seems the more probable of the two, since the beliefs of existing savages prove beyond doubt the possibility of the state of mind supposed. The Tannese islanders, for instance, have the heavens portioned out into constellations, with definite traditions to account for the canoes and ducks and children that they see there. Egede tells us that the Esquimaux thought that some of the stars had been men, and others different sorts of animals or fish. In the South Pacific Islands dying men will announce their intention of becoming a star, and even mention the particular part of the heavens where they are to be looked for. The Bushman regards the more conspicuous stars as men, lions, tortoises, and so forth, while he sees in the Milky Way some wood ashes thrown up by a girl into the sky, that people might see their way home by night. To the Australians, two large stars in the forelegs of Centaurus were two brothers who speared Tchingal to death, the east stars of Crux being the points of the spears that pierced his body. And the Indians of America, who told of the fisherman who once trespassed in heaven in quest of perpetual sunshine, and was shot by an arrow from one of the celestials, could point to the actual Fisher Stars, where the arrow could be seen in the fisherman's tail. We who are accustomed to think of the Milky Way as a vast multitude of unknown worlds, and of the sun simply as the sun-a conception against the impiety of which even Seneca protested-can hardly enter into the feelings of the Esquimaux, to whom the Milky Way represented in all reality the vast concourse of the dead, or of the Andamanese, to whom the sun was literally a woman and the mother of the stars.

But a goodly number of legends in actual European folklore prevent the

necessity of relying solely on the evidence of savage ideas in proof of the reality of this method of regarding or explaining the heavenly bodies. Everything in existence was apparently once regarded as human, or thought of under human attributes, as illustrated in the story of Balder in the Edda. To protect Balder from danger his mother, the goddess Freja, exacted an oath that they would spare his life from water, fire, earth, plants, animals, birds, worms, and even from pestilence, only excepting from the oath one small bush, the mistletoe, not because it was not as human as the rest, but because it was too young to understand the solemnity of an oath. And when Balder met his death from the mistletoe, not only men lamented him, but beasts and plants, and even stones.

The genders of words is a further confirmation of this theory, especially in the case of the sun and moon. In Latin and the Romance languages the sun is masculine and the moon feminine, and in Egypt and Peru the sun and moon were related as brother and sister or as husband and wife. But in German, Arabic, Mexican, Slavonic, and Lithuanian the genders are reversed, and in our own language Shakespeare speaks of the moon as she. But in all languages the fundamental thought is the actual human personality of the two great lights, still the dominant thought among all, or nearly all, the lower races. And the thought still lingers with us, as in Bavaria, where they still speak of Herr Mond and Frau Sonne, and whence the following specimen of natural philosophy is derived.

Moon and sun, they say, were man and wife, but the moon proved but a cold lover, and was so addicted to sleep that one day his wife laid him a wager, by virtue of which the right of shining by day was to belong in future to whichever of them should awake first in the morning. The moon laughed, and accepted the wager, but found when he rose next day that the sun had been already for two hours giving light unto the world; a condition and indeed a consequence of their wager being, that unless they awoke at the same time they should shine at different times. The result of the wager was a permanent separation,

much to the affliction of the triumphant sun, who, still loving her husband, was, and always is, trying to repair the matrimonial breach. Eclipses are really due to meetings with a view to reconciliation; but as the pair always begin with mutual reproaches, the time comes for them to part before they have ceased to quarrel, and so the sun goes away bloodred with anger, and the red clouds often seen at sunset are the tears of blood she sheds.

Given the idea of the sun and moon as a married couple, the belief of the old Prussians that the stars were their children (identical with the Andamanese belief), was an obvious inference. Novels and romances were clearly written in the heavens, and afforded a ready clew to certain natural phenomena. Thus, according to one story, the moon once deserted his wife and eloped with the betrothed of the morning star, for which the god of thunder cut him in two with a knife, as may be distinctly perceived in his shape at certain times! According to another story the sun's jealousy was aroused when the moon took up from the earth a girl who span by moonlight. To be even with him, she took up the girl's lover whom she espied asleep in a wood. The girl and her lover, however, continued faithful to one another in spite of the immense distance between them. The coldness of the spinning girl toward himself caused the moon so lively a distress that he often weeps, and the tears he sheds are what we call the shooting stars!

Or you may regard the shooting stars as the dust which falls from the head of a giantess as she combs her hair with the moon's crescent. Nothing is left unexplained in this philosophy. The phases of the moon presuppose an old giant, too feeble to walk, who mounts the moon as he rises, but who rides him so heavily that the moon's sides are so much pressed in that it takes him some time to recover his normal size. As to the stars, there once were none, till the giants of old, throwing balls at the sun, pierced holes in the sky, and so let the light of that orb shine through those holes which we call stars. The Danes take the moon for a cheese, formed of the milk that has run together out of the Milky Way. In Cyprus they call NEW SERIES.-VOL. XLV., No. 2

that luminary Venus barbata, because she once prayed to the Virgin for help against an importunate lover, and received, to protect her, a beard like a man's. In the Pyrenees they frighten black clouds by showing them their own face in a mirror, and thus avert the devastation of hail-storms.

Nothing more absurd than these ideas can be found among savages, albeit much that is of a precisely similar cast. In what a mental state must the old Jews have lived, who believed that the sun, moon, and stars danced before Adam in Paradise, and that at the end of the world they would do so again in the presence of the just! Or what shall be thought of Slavonic mythology, which regards the stars as living in habitual intercourse with men and their affairs, and which tells of a beautiful maiden who, because she boasted of her beauty as exceeding the sun's, was burned coalblack by that revengeful luminary? Everything shows that no ideas of primitive philosophy are too extravagant to survive into the days of exact science and observation. We may still study the mind of the savage in civilized Europe, where the rude guesses at truth, which constitute the greater part of mythology, are created or preserved very much as they ever were before the primitive Aryans left their common home. And if we wonder how people could ever have seen the remotest resemblance between, say, the sun and a man, we must remember that with our own children the smallest point of similarity between things amply suffices for an inference of complete identity. If the sun and moon suggested the idea of an eye or a face, the imagination would readily supply the other invisible parts. And who can measure the depths of absurdity into which we may get-if the sun, for instance, besides being a man or a woman, may at the same time as easily be thought of as a cow or a wolf, or in fact anything else?

There is, therefore, no essential improbability in assuming that, as the Red Indians, Australians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux interpreted the starlit heavens in the terms of earth, and saw men and animals where we see suns and worlds, so did our Aryan ancestors also, and that in that way originated those names

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and figures of the constellations which are so great a perplexity to ourselves. Why, for instance, did the Greeks give the name of bear to that set of seven stars which we still call the Great Bear; or why should the Hindus have seen in them seven rishi, or wise men? The solar mythologists say that it was in consequence of the development of a verbal root which meant to shine. Says Sir George Cox: "From a root which meant to shine, the Seven Shiners received their name; possibly or probably to the same root belongs the name of the Golden Bear (apkтos and ursa). and thus, when the epithet had by some tribes been confined to the bear, the Seven Shiners were transformed first into seven bears, then into one with Arktouros (Arcturus) for their bearward. In India, too, the name of riksha was forgotten, but instead of referring the word to bears they confounded it with rishi, and the seven stars became the abode of seven poets or sages, who enter the ark with Menu (Minos), and reappear as the Seven Wise Men of Hellas, and the Seven Champions of Christendom." The explanation is highly ingenious; but it is at least as likely an explanation, and a far simpler one, that, just as the house-god Thor was once thought of as a bear, and actually so called, or as the Irokee god Agankitchee became sometimes a wolf, sometimes a bear, so the early Greeks reverenced a man as a bear or a bear as a god, and, when he died, gave him his place among the stars; or, again, that the Hindus did the same by seven wise men, or, seeing seven bright stars, simply interpreted them as seven sages. The Arcadian tale of Callisto, the mother of Arcas, being changed into a bear by the jealousy of Here, and imprisoned in the constellation of the bear, would, from its perfect accordance with the way in which such names are applied to the stars by most of the ruder races of mankind, be a far more likely origin for the Greek or modern English name than the root meaning to shine, which would have no more application to the stars of the Great Bear than to any others of the host of heaven.

Although the reaction of language on thought may undoubtedly add to the resources of mythological absurdity, we

shall do better to regard the influence of thought on language as its original and fundamental principle. The original thought underlying all mythology is the real humanity of all things, and the instantaneous convertibility of one thing into another. That is the essential groundwork of all its absurdities, though there may be other subsidiary causes enough. One, for instance, is the love of making riddles, and making enigmatical allusions to natural phenomena. "The father with his fur full of ears of corn'' is a Lithuanian riddle for the sky and the stars. A popular German riddle for a cloud is a black cow going over a pillarless bridge, whom no one in the whole country can stop. Who would detect in the following Tyrolese enigma an allusion to the sun and moon, heaven and earth, and the seaDue viandanti: Two travellers. Due bene stanti: Two who firmly stand. E un cardinal: And a cardinal? Or who would guess, on hearing the following

Piatto sopra piatto, Uomo ben armato, Donna ben vestita,

Cavalleria ben fornitathat the dish above a dish meant the sky above the earth, the well-armed man the sun, the well-dressed woman the moon, and the well-equipped cavalry the stars? Even if such riddles only implied a fanciful comparison, and not the form into which originally ruder belief about nature came to be translated, it is evident that they would be not without assistance in the production of irrational myths.

From being thought of as persons the sun and moon came gradually to be thought of as places, just as Hades and Orcus are said to have been persons before they were places, or, as in Norse mythology, Hel, the goddess of death, passed into Hell, the abode of the dead. If this change can be traced in European mythology it will help to throw light on the origin of one of the most curious and one of the most widely-spread superstitions of mankind.

The belief in the human personality of the sun and moon appears clearly in stories wherein they take mortals up to them from the earth by way of punishment. The modern Greeks tell a tale