week. Yet it need scarcely be said that to compare in full detail the deities even of closely connected nations, and à fortiori those of tribes not united in language and history, is still a difficult and unsatisfactory task. The old-fashioned identifications of the gods and heroes of different nations admitted most illusory evidence. Some had little more ground than similar-sounding names, as when the Hindu Brahma and Prajâpati were discovered to be the Hebrew Abraham and Japhet, and when even Sir William Jones identified Woden with Buddha. With not much more stringency, it is still often taken as matter of course that the Keltic Beal, whose bealtines correspond with a whole class of bonfire-customs among several branches of the Aryan race, is the Bel or the Baal of the Semitic cultus. Unfortunately, classical scholarship at the Renaissance started the subject on an unsound footing, by accepting the Greek deities with the mystified shapes and perverted names they had assumed in Latin literature. That there was a partial soundness in such comparisons, as in identifying Zeus and Jupiter, Hestia and Vesta, made the plan all the more misleading when Kronos came to figure as Saturn, Poseidon as Neptune, Athene as Minerva. To judge by example of the possible results of comparative theology worked on such principles, Thoth being identified with Hermes, Hermes with Mercury, and Mercury with Woden, there comes to pass the absurd transition from the Egyptian ibis-headed divine scribe of the gods, to the Teutonic heaven-dwelling driver of the raging tempest. It is not in this loose fashion that the mental processes are to be sought out, which led nations to arrange so similarly and yet so diversely their array of deities.
A twofold perplexity besets the soberest investigator on this ground, caused by the modification of deities by development at home and adoption from abroad. Even among the lower races, gods of long traditional legend and worship acquire a mixed and complex personality. The mythologist who seeks to ascertain the precise definition of the Red
