rst
revelation, the first beginning of all trust, of all religion? To us that
wonder of wonders has ceased to exist, and few men now would even venture
to speak of the sun as Sir John Herschel has spoken, calling him "the
Almoner of the Almighty, the delegated dispenser to us of light and
warmth, as well as the centre of attraction, and as such, the immediate
source of all our comforts, and, indeed, of the very possibility of our
existence on earth."(33)

Man is a creature of habit, and wherever we can watch him, we find that
before a few generations have passed he has lost the power of admiring
what is regular, and that he can see signs and wonders only in what is
irregular. Few nations only have preserved in their ancient poetry some
remnants of the natural awe with which the earliest dwellers on the earth
saw that brilliant being slowly rising from out the darkness of the night,
raising itself by its own might higher and higher, till it stood
triumphant on the arch of heaven, and then descended and sank down in its
fiery glory into the dark abyss of the heaving and hissing sea. In the
hymns of the Veda the poet still wonders whether the sun will rise again;
he asks how he can climb the vault of heaven? why he does not fall back?
why there is no dust on his path? And when the rays of the morning rouse
him from sleep and call him back to new life; when he sees the sun, as he
says, stretching out his golden arms to bless the world and rescue it from
the terrors of darkness, he exclaims, "Arise, our life, our spirit has
come back! the darkness is gone, the light approaches!"

For so prominent an object in the primeval picture-gallery of the human
mind, a sign or a name must have been wanted at a very early period. But
how was this to be achieved? As a mere sign, a circle would have been
sufficient, such as we find in the hieroglyphics of Egypt, in the graphic
system of China, or even in our own astronomical tables. If such a sign
was fixed upon, we have a beginning of language in the widest sense of the
word, for we have brought the Sun under the general concept of roundness,
and we have found a sign for this concept which is made up of a large
number of single sensuous impressions. With such definite signs mythology
has little chance; yet the mere fact that the sun was represented as a
circle would favor the idea that the sun was round; or, as ancient people,
who had no adjective as yet for round or _rotundus_,(34) woul