reason gave the sky a new name, I conceive that they would have continued to worship it under its new title. Why should you worship a name because it does not signify, to your mind, the object which you worship? In my opinion the first worshippers of phenomena believed that they were worshipping persons, because to them personality was the essence of all phenomena. There was nothing they could worship that was not a person. As they gradually withdrew personality from phenomena, and restricted it to human beings, the sky-person, with its old name, became a god, while some, perhaps more modern, name was used to signify the sky-thing. I never heard that a Greek worshipped dop, but Nereus was to him a god. Now Nereus was apparently the old term-still surviving (vépov) in popular modern Greek-for water. Of course among people who regard the sun, the sky, the night or the cloud, as not human but bestial personalities, the animal personality may possibly be adored in its separate state, after the cloud, sky, night, or what not, in itself, has ceased to be regarded as a person, and has fallen into the new category of inanimate things.

It is hard to make those things intelligible because we are here dealing not only with metaphysics, which are bad enough, but with the metaphysics of a forgotten stage of human thought. When people speak to one about things in themselves it is dreadful; but when we are concerned with men who regarded animals or beasts as the things in themselves of which night, sky, cloud, or fire were the mere schein, or sensual apparition, why then-as Pet Marjory says of 9 times 9'-it is devilish!'

However we account for it, Mr. Keary and I arrive, at last, at anthropomorphic gods of various natural departments. While some of them, in my opinion, have been developed in the way which I have indicated, others I take to be mere creatures of speculative fancy, invented as the only possible explanations, before science existed, of various phenomena. However, at anthropomorphic gods we arrive at last, at Odin, Indra, Zeus. Now, though, on Mr. Keary's theory, the worshippers of these gods worshipped them because they had forgotten their identity with the sky, the wind, and so on, yet in the legends of these gods he prefers to see little but proofs that they were that which their adorers had forgotten them to be-proofs of their identity with natural phenomena. Thus in the Homeric Zeus he recognises essentially a storm god." The Homeric Zeus, thanks to the genius of Homer, is a deity much more pure and divine than the Zeus of the various temple legends, who was now identical with a cuckoo, now with a bull, now with a swan, or, again, had a mistress who became a she-bear. But a Zeus who can swear by the heaven' is a very different thing from heaven itself. He is a lusty lover of mothers of human families. Mr. Keary, holding by the conception of a heaven god, supposes that each mistress of Zeus, each lady among all those dames galantes, has

6

one example of the philological tendency to explain all the legends of the gods as if these legends were allegorical ways of making statements about the atmosphere, the phenomena of light, and so on. In the same way Hercules is said to be the sun, and so his burning on the pyre on Eta is the sunset. But (supposing for a moment that Hercules has nothing to do with the sun), if his legend were popular in an age when all heroes were burned on pyres, this incident of his burning would inevitably have been narrated. The incident must inevitably have occurred, and, therefore, is no proof of any connection between Hercules and the sun. But everywhere the philologist, having got at his god, looks only at one side of his legend and exaggerates that. When Mr. Keary goes so far as to look on Artemis, and Athene, and Atalanta, as all river goddesses, or apotheosised river mists, one feels that (especially as he thinks that Ahi and Vrittra, the Vedic cloud-monsters, were also rivers) it would be waste of time to argue against his opinions. There is literally no tittle of evidence, as far as I know, to prove that Athene was sprung from the water which watered Athens, no more than this.' Mr. Keary says, in the same bold way, that, to Homer, Athene was 'only Tritogeneia, daughter of Tritus.' On the other hand, Zeus, in Homer, constantly claims Athene as his own daughter. When he comes to Scandinavian mythology, Mr. Keary explains such of the adventures of Odin as he touches on as derived from the characteristics of the wind-Odin being, to his mind, the wind-god. Now, to be brief with this part of the subject, the legends of Odin, Indra, and Zeus, of the highest Aryan gods, are charged with such incidents as are everywhere believed to be common in the experience of contemporary medicine men, all these great gods are like Onditachiæ, in the Jesuit ‘Relations' (1638, p. 114), 'Il est renommé comme un Jupin parmy les Payens, pour avoir en main les pluyes, les vents, et le tonnerre. Odin, the raven god,' has the same magical powers, and performs the same feats as Yehl, the raven hero of the Thlinkeets, and Yehl is only a magnified magician. All the metamorphoses of Zeus and Indra are common feats among sorcerers of the Hindoos, Indian hill-tribes, Abipones, Zulus, Australians, New Zealanders. The command of wind and weather attributed to Zeus is attributed to every starveling little Samoyed drum-thumper, or gin-drinking Fuegian wizard, or naked Australian Biraark, or dirty Eskimo Angekok. In short, the legends of the great gods of nature are not allegorical statements about natural phenomena; as a rule they are stories about gods made originally in their own likeness, by men who believed that several members of their own tribe possessed all the qualities which they attributed to their deities. This side of religious belief is inevitably left out of sight, or explained in a misleading way by writers who, while they believe that human religion first arose among savages, decline to recognise the relics of ordinary savage practice and opinion surviving in religion.

which I have not touched, and is especially copious in its statement of Scandinavian and Teutonic practice and belief. Much space devoted to a theory that the plot of the Odyssey is a modified form of the legends about the River of Death. The Pied Piper is regarded as the wind; the rats are souls of the dead to which the wind pipes. To me these theories seem fanciful; that they are stated in clear, glowing, and picturesque language, and that the descriptions of ancient human life, wherever Mr. Keary touches on it, are beautifully expressed, I am happy to bear my testimony. The interest of Mr. Keary's book will win him many readers; I only ask them not to accept his view of the origin and development of religion without considering what may be said for other theories. For example, they need not follow him, I hope, when he puts forward about Marsyas, and his flaying, this theory: The sober truth about Marsyas's skin was, I suspect, that it was a sheepskin placed in a certain river in Asia Minor, in such a way that the water running through it gave a tuneful sound.' Where, where is the sobriety? Do sheepskins placed in rivers make a tuneful sound? and, if they do, what concern has that with Marsyas? No myth (as far as I am aware) says that Marsyas's skin made a musical sound. His story is only one of very many, all with the moral that a mortal, however gifted, must not strive with a god, and will be flayed, or blinded, or turned into a stone, or a spider, or deprived of his song, if he does contend with his lords.'

6

A. LANG.

WE

NATIONAL NECESSITIES AS THE BASES OF

NATIONAL EDUCATION.1

BY BENJAMIN WARD RICHARDSON, M.D., F.R.S.

E have been discussing, for some weeks past, at the London School Board, the question of higher education, and after many debates have not, as yet, arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. In the course of the debates, two contending principles have been brought out. On one side it has been enthusiastically declared that teaching of a higher standard than that which is now common is necessary, both for the teacher and the taught; the teacher feeling the tax of one continual grind on elementary subjects an intolerable burden, and the taught failing to receive what might, in many instances, prove to be the inestimable blessing of a superior education. On the other side, it has been urged, with great earnestness, though, of course, not with enthusiasm, because enthusiasm can only be allied to aspiration, that the business of the Board ought strictly to be confined to the objects of providing a plain and elementary education for the many thousands of pupils it has under its care; that the development of higher class teaching should rest with those who have the means of paying for it; that if the basis be laid for sound elementary instruction, all who desire to obtain a better class education will, themselves, find the means; that, practically, the present system gives the scholar the key by which he may open the door which leads from the region of darkness to the region of light, so that, being in the light, he can go whithersoever he will; and that, as a consequence, every attempt to add more teaching in the elementary school is a departure from economy, and a misappropriation of the funds which the members of School Boards hold in trust from the public.

I have taken no part in this discussion, except to listen attentively to it, and try to extract from it that which seemed to be useful; and the lesson I have learned is, that in certain ways both parties concerned are in the right and in the wrong. I entirely sympathise with those who say that the present labours of the schoolmaster and schoolmistress must needs be a burden that becomes a daily cross; must be disheartening to a degree that those of us who are engaged in varied pursuits can scarcely recognise; and, though very grand in its results, must be as disappointing to those who are engaged in

Revised and enlarged from a Lecture delivered before the Society of Arts

it, as the mere laying of the foundation of a grand cathedral pile must have been to those who failed to live to see the structure rise beyond the ground, and become what it ultimately would, the admiration of hundreds of succeeding generations.

I am not without sympathy, at the same time, for those who reason on the economical side. I agree with them that when a child of fourteen years can read well, write well, and calculate well, it has done as much as it ought to be allowed to do, in that way, up to that age. If it be forced to do more in form of brain work, it is forced to do what is physically wrong for its body's sake, so much power of work required for its nutrition having been extracted simply for the development of mental aptitude and accretion. I am quite sure, indeed, that in a future and a wiser day, when the physics of life are better understood, men and women generally who have determined to live the whole term of life instead of one third of that term will not care for their children to be troubled with book-lore at all, previous to that first important physical stage of life marked out by the first of the seven stages which ends between the fourteenth and the fifteenth year. I sympathise with the economicals, on yet another ground, namely, that to prime the young with the idea that they are only to learn while they are young is to crystallise them into old men and women from their first, and of a certainty to shorten their lives; because learning is as necessary to perfected life as bread, and because the happiest human existences are the existences of those persons who are always slowly acquiring knowledge in its endless variety of form and character, and who, as they grow older, apply what they acquire the more wisely, effectively, and satisfactorily.

Why, then, it will be asked, if you feel these views, have you not used your right to express them from your place at the School Board? I answer at once, that my views would not have been in order, if expressed, inasmuch as they would not have related to the subject actually under debate. The question under debate has been for more book-learning, and more expense, by the first section; and for no more book-learning, and no more expense, by the second section of speakers. I do not sympathise with the first on the matter of increased book-learning; I do not sympathise with the second in favour of mere economy for economy's sake; and therefore I could not expect to be considered in order on the particular subject under discussion.

There is, however, another subject which no School Board has touched, and which no School Board can touch, until the public mind has become familiar with it. I refer to the question whether the present system of national education is based on the national necessi

In a few years this will be the leading topic of the School Boards everywhere; at present it is in that embryonic condition in which it can only expect to be tended and nurtured by such a society as the Society of Arts, which, as our late distinguished and lamented