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 to life again in spring. There is not a vestige of a myth of the dawn. Even in the Vedas it does not seem certain that any of the myths were originally dawn-myths, and a little reflection will show that if they are very primitive they cannot have been. Professors Gubernatis and Max Müller have drawn pathetic pictures of primitive man’s terror at seeing the kindly orb of day disappear at night, and his thankfulness when it returned, brighter than ever, next morning. These pictures display a lively fancy in the composers of them, but very poor imaginative faculties. The writers seem to forget that primitive man began life, like ourselves, as babies. Moreover, primitive man in many respects resembled children. In fact, just as intra-uterine life is an epitome of our race’s evolution from the primitive monad to the first savage, our early years on earth may be supposed to resemble that of primitive man himself. Now, referring to our early years, we shall certainly find that normal, often recurring events are accepted without fear or criticism. From infancy to ten years of age we witness, or at all events assist at, 3650 sunsets and the same number of sunrises, and are gradually trained to the phenomenon by nature. What infant troubles its head about the changes of day and night? What boy of ten is the least alarmed at the sun’s disappearance, accustomed to it as he is from the earliest days of awakening consciousness? But every savage passes through the same stages of infant and youthful life, so that there is no reason why he should be more alarmed than ourselves. If we interrogate our early past by means of memory, we shall find that the things which impressed us were not frequently-recurring events, but those which happened less frequently—a hard winter, a hot summer, an eclipse of the sun, a comet, the rapid shortening of the forest of the growing hayfield from year to year, for example, and others of the like kind. Such, then, would also be the case with an infant savage, and not more with one than another: that is, all would so feel. Even the more marked changes from summer to winter would soon cease to impress where the change was not exceptionally striking. These myths, which ring a change upon the mysterious disappearance of the winter sun into the black sea of death, could never for instance have originated in warm countries where there is no snow or ice, or next to none, and where, if the sun gives intenser light and more heat in summer, it is far more brilliant and sparkling in winter. An eclipse gives rise to the myth of the dragon eating the sun because it is an event which appeals to the senses, and the myth is a presentation of a fact; the myth of the disappearance of the sun into the black sea, into the womb of night, its death and burial, also represents a felt and seen physical fact, if primitive man invented it, and it is not a scientific allegory which primitive man was not in a condition to create. As to sunsets and sunrises and winters and summers in tepid climates, he takes them as much as a matter of course as do the other animals, to such an extent, in fact, as to resent rational explanations of what seems so commonplace as not to need explaining: witness the Church and Galileo. If this general