THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 167 
_ dite, or Venus, born of the foam of the waves, of female love and 
beauty ; and so forth. And here I would again allude to another 
but kindred branch of ancient human thought to which I adverted 
also last year; I mean Mythology. This I before associated with 
the widening science of Comparative Philology, and I referred to 
the interesting fact of its own fast growth into the perfection of a 
science, on its own account. “The ancient myth,” I said, “ every- 
where fed the poetic instincts, and gave energy to the primeval 
languages of men.” In now reopening the subject, I associate 
Mythology more with Art; and I think I may say, that in the 
wonderful productions which have come down to us we find the 
foundation of the highest Art, which has more or less inspired and 
instructed our own civilisation in this department. When we 
study the sculpture of Greece, the double impersonation of the 
JSorces of Nature and the Human attributes must never be lost 
sight of; and, in the interest of that unifying connection of the 
products of human thought, I observe with pleasure what a flood 
of light has been poured upon those old legends by the researches 
of modern philologists, who have taught us to read the inward 
thought in the outward forms assumed by their language and their 
art;* so that a great part of our grandest modern poetry and 
works of art can only be intelligible to those who know the 
ancient mythology. 
The comparative study of languages has led us to take more 
enlarged views of mythology. We do not imagine that we can 
understand the mythology of a particular people without examin- 
ing that of all related peoples. So that a deep philosophy in fact 
has thus been evolved from what students once considered mere 
idle tales—beautiful and poetic, but without meaning. The fact is, 
that in the recently-unearthed languages of the East we have 
splendid evidence of the identity of our modern with the ancient 
races of civilised manhood. Take the structure of the old tongues, 
and you will find that nearly all the languages of modern Europe 
can be united in common with Greek and Latin, in a chain of 
filiated descent with that wonderful sacred language the Devanagart, 
“‘God-spoken tongue,” as_its utterers proudly called it, which 
was once spoken beneath the Himalayas. And again, if you take 
the LITERARY CONTENTS of these languages, you will discover with 
* D'Anvers. The translator properly refers to Cox’s “Tales of the Gods 
and Heroes,’ and to the works of Max-Miuiller, Grote, and others. 
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