primeval man, living in the closest communion with nature, must have begun with a strong feeling of his likeness to the brutes who shared with him so many wants, passions, pleasures, and pains. Hence the attribution of human voice and reason to birds and beasts in fable and story, and the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. To this feeling of fellowship there would afterwards be superadded a sense of a mysterious something inherent in the nature of brutes, which was lacking in that of man He found himself so vastly surpassed by them in strength, agility, and keenness of sense; they evinced such a marvellous foreknowledge of coming atmospheric changes which he could not surmise; they went so straight to their mark, guided by an instinct to him incomprehensible, that he might well come to look upon them with awe as beings superior to himself, and surmise in their wondrous manifestations the workings of something divine.*

The distinction made in historic times between gods of the upper sky, the waters, and the subterranean world, was unknown to the primitive Aryans. The horizon, where earth and sky seem to meet together, was the place in which the supernatural powers were most frequently descried. When they

* Herder, Ideen. Hertz, Der Werwolf.

were not there they were beyond the clouds, in their own world, which was common to them all, and which extended indefinitely above and below the surface of the earth. The origin of most watergods and nymphs of the European Aryans may be traced back to the storm and rain deities of the parent stock; and the greater part of the myths relating to the sea are to be understood as primarily applying not to the earthly, but the cloud-sea, for no other great collection of waters was known to the first Aryans in their inland home. In like manner mythical mountains, rocks, and caverns are generally to be understood as clouds. It was in the clouds that men first beheld the deities of the under-world, whose abode was fixed in later times in the regions from which they might have been supposed to ascend when there was wild work to be done in mid-air.

Although, as we have said, the cloud-sea of the first Aryans has been generally transferred to the earth in the mythologies of the West, nevertheless the existence of an ocean overhead continued to be an article of wide-spread belief in Europe, down at least to the thirteenth century; nor is it quite extinct in some places even at this day. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, fought hard against it in the ninth century. Many persons, he says, are so insensate as to believe

that there is a region called Magonia, whence ships come in the clouds to take on board the fruits of the earth which have been beaten down by storm and hail. The aerial navigators carry on a regular traffic in that way with the storm-making wizards, pay them for the corn they have thrashed with wind and hail, and ship it off to Magonia.*

Gervase of Tilbury† relates, that as the people were coming out from a church in England, on a dark cloudy day, they saw a ship's anchor fastened in a heap of stones, with its cable reaching up from it to the clouds. Presently they saw the cable strained, as if the crew were trying to haul it up, but it still stuck fast. Voices were then heard above the clouds, apparently in clamorous debate, and a sailor came sliding down the cable. As soon as he touched the ground the crowd gathered round him, and he died, like a man drowned at sea, suffocated by our damp thick atmosphere. An hour afterwards his shipmates cut their cable and sailed away; and the anchor they had left behind was made into fastenings and ornaments for the church door, in memory of the wondrous event. The same author tells another tale to the like effect. A native of Bristol

* D. M. 604.

In his Otia Imperialia, composed about A.D. 1211.

sailed from that port for Ireland, leaving his wife and family at home. His ship was driven far out of its course to the remote parts of the ocean, and there it chanced that his knife fell overboard, as he was cleaning it one day after dinner. At that very

moment his wife was seated at table with her children in their house at Bristol, and behold! the knife fell through an open skylight, and stuck in the table before her. She recognised it immediately; and when her husband came home long afterwards they compared notes, and found that the time when the knife had fallen from his hand corresponded exactly with that in which it had been so strangely recovered. "Who, then," exclaims Gervase, "after such evidence as this, will doubt the existence of a sea above this earth of ours, situated in the air or over it?" Such a sea is still known to Celtic tradition. "If our fathers have not lied," say the peasants of La Vendée, "there are birds that know the way of the upper sea, and may no doubt carry a message to the blessed in Paradise.”*

The elemental nature of the early Aryan gods, however obscured in the monstrous growths of the later Hindu theology, is most transparent in the Rig Veda, the oldest collection of writings extant in

* Huber, "Skizzen aus der Vendee." Berlin, 1853. p. 65.

any Indo-European tongue. It was put together somewhere about the year 1400 B.C., and consists of the hymns chanted by the southern branch of the Aryans, after they had passed the Indian Caucasus, and descended into the plain of the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the Punjaub or Five Rivers, and the Sarasvati), thence to overrun all India. The Sanscrit tongue in which the Vedas are written is the sacred language of India: that is to say, the oldest language, the one which was spoken, as the Hindus believe, by the gods themselves, when gods and men were in frequent fellowship with each other, from the time when Yama descended from heaven to become the first of mortals. This ancient tongue may not be the very one which was spoken by the common ancestors of Hindus and Europeans, but at least it is its nearest and purest derivative, nor is there any reason to believe that it is removed from it by more than a few degrees. Hence the supreme importance of the Sanscrit vocabulary and literature as a key to the languages and the supernatural lore of ancient and modern Europe.

"The divinities worshipped [in the Rig Veda] are not unknown to later [Hindu] systems; but they there perform very subordinate parts; whilst those deities who are the great gods-the dii majores-of