e. But the Greek Theogony
here skips suddenly to the human period; and under the fables of the
marriage of Gaea and Uranos, and the Titans, appears to present to us
the antediluvian world, with its intermarriages of the sons of God and
men, and its Nephelim or Giants, with their mechanic arts and their
crimes. Beyond this, in Kronos and his three sons, and in the strange
history of Zeus, the chief of these, we have a coarse and fanciful
version of the story of the family of Noah, the insult offered by Ham to
his father, and the subsequent quarrels and dispersion of mankind. The
Zeus of Homer appears to be the elder of the three, or Japheth, the real
father of the Greeks, according to the Bible; but in the time of Hesiod
Zeus was the youngest, perhaps indicating that the worship of the
Egyptian Zeus, Ammon or Ham, had already supplanted among the Greeks
that of their own ancestor. But it is curious that even in the Bible,
though Japhet is said to be the greater, he is placed last in the lists.
After the introduction of Greek savans and literati to Egypt, about B.C.
660, they began to regard their own mythology from this point of view,
though obliged to be reserved on the subject. The cosmology of Thales,
the astronomy of Anaxagoras, and the history of Herodotus afford early
evidence of this, and it abounds in later writers. I may refer the
reader to Grote (History of Greece, vol. i.) for an able and agreeable
summary of this subject; and may add that even the few coincidences
above pointed out between Greek mythology and the Bible, independently
of the multitudes of more doubtful character to be found in the older
writers on this subject, appear very wonderful, when we consider that
among the Greeks these vestiges of primitive religion, whether brought
with them from the East or received from abroad, must have been handed
down for a long time by oral tradition among the people; but obscure
though they may be, the circumstance that some old writers have ridden
the resemblances to death affords no excuse for the prevailing neglect
of them in more modern times.]

[Footnote 42: Pages 21, 22, and 109, _supra_.]

[Footnote 43: The minor planets discovered in more recent times between
Mars and Jupiter form an exception to this; but they are of little
importance, and exceptional in other respects as well. To give their
arrangement and the motions of the satellites of Uranus, would require
the further assumption of some unknown