ion.
Absolutely right no one can be in such matters; nor does a day pass
without convincing every honest student of antiquity of some partial
error, and showing him better how to think, and where to look. But I
knew that there was no hope of my being able to enter with advantage on
the fields of history opened by the splendid investigation of recent
philologists, though I could qualify myself, by attention and sympathy,
to understand, here and there, a verse of Homer's or Hesiod's, as the
simple people did for whom they sang.

Even while I correct these sheets for press, a lecture by Professor
Tyndall has been put into my hands, which I ought to have heard last 16th
January, but was hindered by mischance; and which, I now find, completes,
in two important particulars, the evidence of an instinctive truth in
ancient symbolism; showing, first, that the Greek conception of an
aetherial element pervading space is justified by the closest reasoning of
modern physicists; and, secondly, that the blue of the sky, hitherto
thought to be caused by watery vapour, is, indeed, reflected from the
divided air itself; so that the bright blue of the eyes of Athena, and
the deep blue of her aegis, prove to be accurate mythic expressions of
natural phenomena which it is an uttermost triumph of recent science to
have revealed.

Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine triumph more complete. To form,
"within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky
itself!" here is magic of the finest sort! singularly reversed from that
of old time, which only asserted its competency to enclose in bottles
elemental forces that were--not of the sky.

Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for the true wonder of this piece
of work, ask his pardon, and that of all masters in physical science, for
any words of mine, either in the following pages or elsewhere, that may
ever seem to fail in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or
in the admiration due to the far scope of their discovery. But I will be
judged by themselves, if I have not bitter reason to ask them to teach us
more than yet they have taught.

This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun
thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In
that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought
upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.
The light which once flushed those pale