In speaking of the various beliefs relative to plant life in a previous chapter, we have enumerated some of the legends which would trace the origin of many plants to the shedding of human blood, a belief which is a distinct survival of a very primitive form of belief, and enters very largely into the stories told in classical mythology.

A great part, not only of the heathen mythology, but of the Jewish Scriptures, are supposed to refer to it.

In classic mythology the bucentaur was half man and half ox.

In many cases a striking similarity is noticeable, showing a common origin, a circumstance which is important to the student of comparative mythology when tracing the distribution of religious beliefs.

At any rate the tree of the world, and the greatest of all trees, has long been identified in the northern mythology as the ash tree, a fact which accounts for the weird character assigned to it amongst all the Teutonic and Scandinavian nations, frequent illustrations of which will occur in the present volume.

SEE Ferguson, John C. Chinese mythology.

And hence the necessity of that new revelation which Jesus declared amid the moral ruins of a crumbling world, by which alone can the debasing superstitions of India and the godless materialism of China be replaced with a vital spirituality,even as the elaborate mythology of Greece and Rome gave way before the fervent earnestness of Christian apostles and martyrs.

By their conversation and familiar remarks, I observed that they were habitually under the influence of their peculiar mythology and religion.

Vol.2: Eddic mythology.

Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death's twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble.

Ugaritic mythology: a study of its leading motifs.

How far they borrowed from the fertile mythology of their Nahuatl visitors is not easily answered.

I shall quote a few of these stories as told by early authorities, not adding anything to relieve their crude simplicity, and then I will see whether, when submitted to the test of linguistic analysis, this unpromising ore does not yield the pure gold of genuine mythology.

These main subjects occupy the upper spaces of each wall, while below them are placed portraits of poets, surrounded by rich and fanciful arabesques, including various episodes from Dante and antique mythology.

The Sleep and Death of the Homeric mythology were naturally gentle divinities,sometimes lifting the slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly through the air to his home and weeping kindred.

The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how, when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.

Nothing moved in those gloomy, waste poems whose impassive mythologies ended by finally leaving him cold.

A friend, writing to me from Italy, speaks thus of Botticelli, and of the painters associated with him: "When I ask myself what it is I find fascinating in himfor instance, which of his pictures, or what element in themI am forced to admit that it is the touch of paganism in him, the fairy-story element, the echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which he has found the means of transmitting."

PSYCHE (i. e. the soul), in the later Greek mythology the youngest of three daughters of a king, and of such beauty as to eclipse the attractions and awake the jealousy of Venus, the goddess of beauty, who in consequence sent Cupid, her son, to inspire her with love for a hideous monster, and so compass her ruin.

It has been occasionally difficult to decide whether some of the allusions, to minute points in ancient history, mediæval mythology, and contemporary politics, should be explained or left alone; but I have preferred to err on the side of giving a brief clue to details, with which every scholar is familiar.

THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.

It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination, to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions, and to satisfy man's curiosity regarding the universe with tangible answers that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy.

In the allegorical introduction to the Revolt of Islam, which is an interesting example of Shelley's mystical mythology, we have an insight into the poet's view of the good power in the world.

But there are comparatively few of the native mythologies that do not betray some of its elements, some fragments of it, and, often enough to justify us in the supposition that had we the complete body of their sacred stories, we should find this one in quite as defined a form as I have given it.

The anthropomorphic Greek mythology encouraged sculptors to concentrate their attention upon what Hegel called "the sensuous manifestation of the idea," while Greek habits rendered them familiar with the body frankly exhibited.