62 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



Asiatic nations, is not necessarily an evidence of the eastern origin of 

 the nations of the New World. But in the services to which it gave 

 rise, we have at least suggestive hints of the links that bind together 

 its ancient and modern tribes ; perhaps, also, they may supply a clue 

 to the interpretation of some of the obscure sculptures, with their 

 mysterious hieroglyphics, still remaining on sites of the extinct native 

 civilization of America, and of rites once practised amid the sacred 

 enclosures, and on the altar mounds which give such peculiar 

 interest to the river terraces of the Mississippi Valley. 



In tracing the personification of the deities of old, the link 

 that connected such personification with the ideas of the instituters 

 of Heathen worship is easily distinguishable. In the early days of 

 Greece, for instance, the division of the deities contained only those 

 emblematic of the forms, properties and powers of nature, and next 

 the impersonation of the qualities of the mind. The first were the 

 natural result of the awe that filled the mind when it observed the 

 mysterious changes perpetually going on in the world around, the 

 apparent agency of something giving fertility to the earth and 

 motion to the wind and sea. The dogma of that was '■'■Jupiter est 

 quodcunque vides." And of this deification of the all, the deification 

 of the parts was a natural consequence. Pantheism led to 

 Polytheism. So the powers of nature were worshipped under various 

 forms and with various rites, consonant to their supposed attributes, 

 and the idea of the existence of such beings was so brought to the 

 minds of the people that at length representations of these unseen 

 agents, fashioned as the mind would naturally personify them, were 

 made. 



As years rolled on and man passed from the contemplation of 

 material forms to that of spiritual phenomena, and when the 

 principles of social existence began to be understood, then it 

 became necessary to typify ' the qualities of the mind. To this we 

 may trace Apollo, the patron of learning; Minerva, the legend of 

 whose birth typified a blending together of the characteristic influ- 

 ence of the sexes, masculine strength and female beauty. And so 

 could we trace one by one the attributes that connected each deity 

 with the form assigned to it, the connecting link in the mind of that 

 cultured race that coupled the ideal with the character and pro- 

 pensities of the time. 



Language is another of the connecting links of nations. 



