48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and laid his friend there and covered him up. And when Adam saw 

 this he said to Eve, ' We will do the same with Abel.' God rewarded 

 the raven for this by promising that none should ever injure his young ; 

 that he should always have meat in abundance, and that his prayer for 

 rain should be immediately answered." 



From the same source Ave select one more legend, in which the ra- 

 ven appears as the possessor of a valuable secret, which, upon compul- 

 sion, it teaches the great king : " While Solomon was building the 

 temple, he captured lachr, one of the most powerful of all the jinns ; 

 and, having the demon bound and completely in his control, he prom- 

 ised him his liberty if he would tell him how the hardest metals could 

 be cut and shaped without noise. ' I myself know of no means,' an- 

 swered the demon, ' but the raven can tell thee how to do this. Take 

 the eggs out of the raven's nest and place a crystal cover upon them, 

 and thou shalt see how the raven will break it.' Solomon followed 

 the advice of lachr. A raven came and fluttered some time around 

 the cover, and, seeing that she could not reach hei" eggs, she vanished, 

 and returned shortly with a stone in her beak, named iamur or 

 ichamir, and no sooner had she touched the crystal therewith, than it 

 clave asunder. 'Whence hast thou this stone?' asked Solomon of the 

 raven, ' It comes from a mountain in the far west,' replied the bird. 

 Solomon commanded a jinn to follow the raven to the mountain and 

 bring him more of those stones. Then he released lachr as he had 

 promised. When the jinn returned with the stone ichamir, Solomon 

 went back to Jerusalem, and distributed the stones among the jinns 

 whom he had employed in building the temple." 



In the Egyptian mythology we have no single equivalent of the 

 gloriovis sun-god of the Greeks ; and, though the Rosetta-stone has ex- 

 plained to us the mystery of the hieroglyphs, and revealed the long- 

 hidden meaning of many of the sculptured monuments and half -effaced 

 papyri of the land of the Pharaohs, yet much of her curious mythology 

 is a sealed book, and the attributes of some of her unique gods are still 

 enigmas even to the most learned Egyptologists. Osiris, Aroueris, 

 (the elder Horus), Harpocrates (the younger Horus), Chnum, Ra, Tum, 

 and Mentu were all deifications of the sun during some part of the day 

 or year ; but it is no easy matter to limit the peculiar province of each 

 god, or give his exact equivalent in Greek thought ; and though He- 

 rodotus and other Greek writers assert that Horus was the same as the 

 Greek Apollo, even this throws but little light upon the subject, since 

 there were two Egyptian gods bearing this name, and several (proba- 

 bly deified) kings, one of whom restored the worship of the sun, after 

 it had been forbidden by Amenophis lY, and had been neglected for 

 nearly one hundred years. However, it is at least certain that Horus 

 was worshiped by the Egyptians as the embodiment of the sun in a 

 part of his course, and to him were sacred the hawk, the wolf, and the 

 crow. Pritchard, quoting from ^olian's " History of Animals," says. 



