the same materials, and by means of an instrument called a spectroscope, which enables astronomers to examine the light from the stars, no matter how many years it has been travelling to the earth, they are able to tell what metals are burning in those far-off bodies, and they find that those materials which are most plentiful in the stars are those which enter so largely into the structure of living creatures on the earth.

It is therefore no blind guess, but well-proved truth, that matter throughout the universe of God. is the same in kind, but in different states. In the sun and his fellow-suns, the stars, it is whitehot; on the earth and some other planets (Mars, for example, on which a good telescope clearly shows the division of land and water and the increase of snow at the poles as the winter nears) it is cool enough to sustain life; in the moon and meteors it is cold and barren; while in some of the cloud-like clusters in the sky called nebulæ (from Latin nebula, a cloud), it is in a gas-like

state.

Having said thus much, it would be needful to say a good deal more, but I am only acting as a

should like to know, or where men grow blind rest.' But we shall

finger-post to point what I think is the right road in which sound knowledge about this world's history can be gained. You need not think that the lesson will be quickly learned, or that the knowledge will ever be completed here. Science can never tell us all that we lead us beyond the veil though angels know the agree that her 'marvellous tale' has as much poetry in it as the old legends quoted, and certainly more of fact. The cloud-like mass becomes a cooled globe, a fair and fertile world given man for dwelling-place, truly an Eden (land of delight, as that word means) where the soft air was wafted laden with the fragrance of sweet flowers, where the birds warbled love-music, and the stream murmured its thanks for the jewels which the sunlight scattered on its bosom.

CHAPTER IV.

LEGENDS OF THE PAST ABOUT MANKIND.

To the legends already given may be added a few concerning the early state of mankind.

was

For thousands of years before the rudest kind of picture-writing was invented, the mind of man busily speculating how that which he saw had come to pass, and not less, but rather more, would he wonder whence and how he himself had come; and out of that wonderment have grown the legends which have been handed down by old-world fathers to their children. These legends of a beginning, of the first man, and of a bright unflecked day whose glory had gone, legends in which a little fact was mixed up with much guessing, came to be looked upon as true every word, and were at last set down not as largely born of the fancy of man, but as history to be believed. And we find them lingering still among tribes and nations, because none readily

give up the old for the new and cut themselves adrift from that which their fathers held dear.

Nearly all speak of happy times spent without labour or care, and then of evil stealing in and beguiling men with a lie. Seeking to explain the mystery of sorrow and pain, of the guilt and hard toil to which none are strangers, they have dreamed of a past when these ills were not. 'The Pârsî looks back to the happy rule of King Yima, when men and cattle were immortal, when water and trees never dried up and food was plentiful, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age. The Buddhist looks back to the age of glorious soaring beings who had no sin, no sex, no want of food till the unhappy hour when, tasting a delicious scum that formed upon the surface of the earth, they fell into evil and in time became degraded. It was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the people who heard of it, not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white or black or blue. Men's lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha Sâgara who, after a brief reign of two hundred and fifty-two

thousand years, made the dismal discovery of the first grey hair.'

The Tibetans and Mongolians believe that the first human beings were as gods, but desiring a certain sweet herb, they ate of it, and lower feelings were thus aroused within them; their wings dropped off; their beauty faded; and the years of their life were made few and filled with bitterness. Passing by any full account of the Hindu story of a tree of life on a mountain ever bathed in sunshine, where no sin could enter and where dreadful dragons kept the way to the heavenly plants and fruits, and also of the Greek belief that far away there were the Islands of the Blessed with a garden full of golden apples guarded by an unsleeping serpent, we have the Greek myth which tells us that the first men were happy and without work, but with a desire to assert their power, and withal defy or mock the gods. Then Prometheus shaped a human form out of clay, and stole forbidden fire from heaven wherewith to give it life. This made Zeus angry, and he laid a plan by which the

evils that mankind dreaded, and which were