logist and student of comparative folk-lore; so he was, as it were, warned off the ground with the polite request that he should be content to amuse himself with observing the queer ways and learning the strange stories of contemporary savages. This was of course of no avail, for he soon returned to lay ruthless hands on our most cherished theories of mythology, and to tell us, that, whether we liked it or not, our Aryan ancestors were savages who did not greatly differ from other savages of other times and other lands. We are forced to listen and to admit that his method of working is in principle both simple and sound. Thus when he finds a civilized people in possession of a savage myth or a savage rite, he tries to find, for the purposes of comparison, the like myth or the like rite cherished by savages, among whom the meaning of the same is well known or easy to ascertain. This has been successfully done[1] with the Greek myth of Cronus, which is not only instructive as an instance of the true method, but important to us as bearing on one of the subjects of this lecture. The chief features of the myth, as drawn by Mr. Andrew Lang from Greek literature,[2] were the following: Gaea or Earth gave birth to Uranus or Heaven, and later she became her son's wife: they had many children, some of whom were gods of the elements, such as Oceanus, the deep, Hyperion, the sun, and Cronus of Crooked Counsel, who ever hated his mighty sire. Now Heaven used to hide his children from the light in the hollows of Earth,
