printed in a selection of nursery rhymes by Taylor, 1828. A
modern well-known baby dance.

CHAPTER III.

"The moon is up; by Heaven, a lovely eve!
Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand."

The Norwegian explorer, Dr. Nansen, in his address to the Royal
Geographical Society on February 9th, 1897, stated:--

"The long Arctic day was beautiful in itself, though one soon got tired
of it. But when that day vanished and the long Polar night began, then
began the kingdom of beauty, then they had the moon sailing through the
peculiar silence of night and day. The light of the moon shining when
all was marble had a most singular effect."[B]

Writers on Comparative Religions for the most part assert that moon
worship amongst the almost utterly savage tribes in Africa and America,
the hunting, nomad races of to-day, is a noteworthy feature. "It is not
the sun that first attracted the attention of the savage."[C] "In order
of birth the worship of the night sky, inclusive of that of the moon,
precedes that of the day sky and the sun. It was observed long ago that
wherever sun worship existed moon worship was to be found, being a
residuum of an earlier state of religion."[D]

What the early primal melody of thousands of years ago may have been one
can hardly suggest, but that the subject-matter of the song was mythical
there can be very little doubt, and, like folk-lore tales, built upon
and around nature worship; for as the capacity for creating language
does not exhaust all its force at once, but still continues to form new
modes of speech whenever an alteration of circumstances demands them, so
it is with myths. The moon during a long Polar night reigning in a
kingdom of crystalline beauty, when all around is silence and grandeur,
would suggest to the dweller on the fringe of the ice fields--his deity.
The sun, in like manner shedding forth its genial warmth, the
agriculturist would learn to welcome, and to ascribe to its power the
increase of his crop, and just as the limitation of reason holds the
untutored man in bondage, so the myth, the outcome of his ignorance,
becomes his god.

Even though social advancement has made rapid strides among
comparatively modern peoples and nations, not only traces of
mythological, but entire religious observances, reclothed in Christian
costumes, are still kept up. Praying to an apple tree to yield an
abundant crop was the habit of the Bohemian peasant, until C