No. 4.] LOVE AM) STUDY OF NATURE. 137 



earliest products of the Greek mind arc the Orphic hymns, 

 some of the best of which we tind addressed to night, heaven, 

 ether, echo, earth, sun, stars, clouds, nature, Pan, etc. Read 

 histories of national literature, or of special departments of 

 them, like Veitsch, Biese, Reynolds, Fischer on the influence 

 of the sea on poetry, and the farther back we go, the more 

 evident and all-dominating is the influence of nature. 



IV. Religion. Max Miiller estimates that, of three 

 thousand Aryan deities, nearly if not every one were origi- 

 nally nature gods ; and I venture the assertion that hardly 

 any common or prominent object or department of nature 

 has not somewhere by some people or person been made an 

 object of supreme "worship. The Persians and Babylonians 

 were star worshippers, and their only priests were astrolo- 

 gists. The sun and moon were the highest deities for 

 Socrates, and countless temples have been dedicated to their 

 worship. Even Johanna Ambrosius, that amazing German 

 peasant-poet genius, prays in one of her poems that when 

 she dies she may spend eternity in the moon. Parsees wor- 

 shipped tire, which Heraclites made the supreme principle, 

 of which religion the Zend A vesta is the Bible. The East 

 Indians held clouds, storms, weather and lightning to be 

 divine. Many savages worship water, which Thales thought 

 the best of all revelations of deity. Not only savages, but 

 half-civilized peoples, have been fetish worshippers, and bow 

 down in religious awe before stones and other inanimate 

 objects used as charms and amulets, as Mr. Condar has 

 shown in his fascinating book, entitled "Heth and Moab." 

 Flower and plant oracles in popular superstition are rem- 

 nants of a wide religious cult, which associated plants and 

 planets for both medical and sacred uses by the doc- 

 trine of signatures. The Druids, as the name indicates, 

 were tree worshippers, and for them as for no others the 

 groves were God's first temples. Nearly all the primitive 

 population of America were totem worshippers, and held 

 that beasts and birds were incarnations of great heroes of 

 the past, whose souls had entered their bodies by transmigra- 

 tion. Serpent worship, as Mr. Ferguson has well proven, 

 at one time spread nearly all over the world. Confucius and 

 the Chinese and many polvtheists worship human ancestors 



