with full udders milked by the winds
of heaven is beyond our comprehension, and yet their Veda contains
indisputable testimony to the fact that they were so regarded." We have
only to read Mr. Baring-Gould's book of "Curious Myths," from which
I have just quoted, or to dip into Mr. Thorpe's treatise on "Northern
Mythology," to realize how vast is the difference between our
stand-point and that from which, in the later Middle Ages, our immediate
forefathers regarded things. The frightful superstition of werewolves is
a good instance. In those days it was firmly believed that men could be,
and were in the habit of being, transformed into wolves. It was believed
that women might bring forth snakes or poodle-dogs. It was believed that
if a man had his side pierced in battle, you could cure him by nursing
the sword which inflicted the wound. "As late as 1600 a German writer
would illustrate a thunder-storm destroying a crop of corn by a picture
of a dragon devouring the produce of the field with his flaming tongue
and iron teeth."

Now if such was the condition of the human intellect only three or four
centuries ago, what must it have been in that dark antiquity when not
even the crudest generalizations of Greek or of Oriental science had
been reached? The same mighty power of imagination which now, restrained
and guided by scientific principles, leads us to discoveries and
inventions, must then have wildly run riot in mythologic fictions
whereby to explain the phenomena of nature. Knowing nothing whatever
of physical forces, of the blind steadiness with which a given effect
invariably follows its cause, the men of primeval antiquity could
interpret the actions of nature only after the analogy of their own
actions. The only force they knew was the force of which they were
directly conscious,--the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all
the outward world to be endowed with volition, and to be directed by it.
They personified everything,--sky, clouds, thunder, sun, moon, ocean,
earthquake, whirlwind. [9] The comparatively enlightened Athenians of
the age of Perikles addressed the sky as a person, and prayed to it to
rain upon their gardens. [10] And for calling the moon a mass of dead
matter, Anaxagoras came near losing his life. To the ancients the moon
was not a lifeless ball of stones and clods: it was the horned huntress,
Artemis, coursing through the upper ether, or bathing herself in the
clear lake; or it was Aphro