5 0 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
then generally a god of commerce, and the adroitness which com- 
merce demands. Athena, in the same way, the daughter of the 
dark-clouded Jove, is the flashing-eyed maiden, because she repre- 
sents the feminine aspect of the sky, of which her sire represents 
the masculine. Juno, again, by many manifest signs, is certainly 
the earth anthropomorphised out of the physical yrj, just as Zetis 
was out of ovpavos. Then, again, if Apollo be the sun, Artemis, 
his sister, without going further, must be the moon ; and Dionysus, 
the wine god, whose Oriental origin and late introduction is certified, 
stands by virtue of the phallic symbol manifestly an Oriental god 
of the generative virtue, just as Hermes was in Arcadia by the same 
symbol proclaimed the patron of breeding to the sheep-farmers 
of the Pelasgic peninsula. Then, by the same process of look- 
ing at what is before me, apart from Herman theories and Sanscrit 
etymologies, I reserve a considerable domain in the mythological 
land for exaggerated and met amorphic history; not at all con- 
cerned that I may be looked on by the winged Hermans as a 
dull, prosaic fellow, or a disciple of the atheistic Euhemerus — for 
Euhemerus also was not altogether wrong, and the worship of 
human ideals as, at least, one element in many mythologies, is one 
of the most accredited facts in the history of the human race. And 
if I seem to have achieved a very small thing when I keep myself 
within these bounds, I have at least kept myself clear of nonsense, 
which in mythological science is as common as sunk rocks in the 
Shetland seas. To Max Mtiller, and other Sanscrit scholars, 
I hope I shall always be grateful for any happy illustrations which 
they may supply of the general character of Aryan myths, and of 
occasional coincidences of the Hellenic mode of imagining with the 
Indian ; and I think the somewhat cold and unimaginative race of 
English scholars are under no small obligations to him for having 
taught them to recognise poetical significance and religious value 
in some legends, which passed in their nomenclature for silly 
fables or worthless facts ; but I profess to have been unable to 
derive any sure clue from the far East to the most difficult questions 
of Hreek mythology; nor do I expect that, when every obsolete word 
in the Rig Veda shall have been thoroughly sifted and shaken, a 
single ray of intelligible light will thence flow on the Athena of 
the Parthenon or the Hermes of the Cyllenian slopes. I believe 
