he earth by the deluge, which destroyed its former fertility, and
rendered tillage and agriculture necessary to mankind.

PARCAE, _or_ FATES, were goddesses supposed to preside over the accidents
and events, and to determine the date or period of human life. They were
reckoned by the ancients to be three in number, because all things have
a beginning, progress, and end. They were the daughters of Jupiter and
Themis, and sisters to the Horae, or Hours.

Their names, amongst the Greeks, were Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis, and
among the Latins, Nona, Decima, Morta. They are called Parcae, because,
as Varro thinks, they distributed to mankind good and bad things at
their birth; or, as the common and received opinion is, because they
spare nobody. They were always of the same mind, so that though
dissensions sometimes arose among the other gods, no difference was ever
known to subsist among these three sisters, whose decrees were
immutable. To them was intrusted the spinning and management of the
thread of life; Clotho held the distaff, Lachesis turned the wheel, and
Atropos cut the thread.

Plutarch tells us they represented the three parts of the world, viz.
the firmament of the fixed stars, the firmament of the planets, and the
space of air between the moon and the earth; Plato says they represented
time past, present, and to come. There were no divinities in the pagan
world who had a more absolute power than the Fates. They were looked
upon as the dispensers of the eternal decrees of Jupiter, and were all
of them sometimes supposed to spin the party-colored thread of each
man's life. Thus are they represented on a medal, each with a distaff in
her hand. The fullest and best description of them in any of the poets,
is in Catullus: he represents them as all spinning, and at the same time
singing, and foretelling the birth and fortunes of Achilles, at Peleus'
wedding.

An ingenious writer, in giving the true mythology of these characters,
apprehends them to have been, originally, nothing more than the mystical
figure or symbols which represented the months of January, February, and
March, among the Egyptians, who depicted them in female dresses, with
the instruments of spinning and weaving, which was the great business
carried on in that season. These images they called _Parc_, which
signifies _linen cloth_, to denote the manufacture produced by this
temporary industry. The Greeks, ever fertile in invention, and knowing