which nothing can escape, and the irresistible grasp of his talons. All this with us is mere poetry, but all early language is poetry. There is nothing more certainly established by the science of language than "the fact that all words expressive of immaterial conceptions are derived by metaphor from words expressive of sensible ideas." But besides such metaphors as those of which I have just been speaking, and which are intelligible even when translated, there are others which are necessarily peculiar to the language in which they originated. The names of Seb and of Tehuti, as we have seen, were to the Egyptians connected with the names of the goose and the ibis. Anpu (Anubis) "is apparently," as Mr. Goodwin says, "the ancient Egyptian name for a jackal." Sebek, one of the names of the Sun-god, is also the name of a kind of crocodile. It is not improbable that the cat, in Egyptian müu, became the symbol of the Sun-god, or Day, because the word müu also means light. It is, I think, quite easy to see how the mythological symbolism arose through these varieties of metaphorical language. And this metaphorical language reacted upon thought, and, as in other religions, obtained the mastery. The triumph of the symbol over the thought is most sensibly visible in the development of the worship of the Apis Bull. This worship is indeed as old as the age of the Pyramids, but an inspection of the tombs of the bulls in the Serapeum discovered by M. Mariette under 238 the sands of Saqara, shows how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former. Dean Stanley1 has described these: "Long galleries, hewn in the rock and opening from time to time-say every fifty yards-into high-arched vaults, under each of which reposes the most magnificent black marble sarcophagus that can be conceived --a chamber rather than a coffin-smooth and sculptured within and without; grander by far than ever the granite sarcophagi of the Theban king,-how much grander than any human sepulchres anywhere else! And all for the successive corpses of the bull Apis! These galleries formed part of the great temple of Scrapis, in which the Apis mummies were deposited; and here they lay, not in royal, but in divine state. The walls of the entrances are covered with ex-votos. In one porch there is a painting at full length, black and white, of the Bull himself as he was in life." No one who has seen the tombs of these strange gods can doubt the accounts given by the classical writers as to the extravagant expenses incurred at a single funeral. But if one of the funerals of an Apis cost fifty talents, not less than a hundred talents are said to have been expended by curators of other sacred 1 "Sinai and Palestine,” p. lii. 2 A breakfast-party has been held in one of these coffins. animals. The Apis was called "the second life of Ptah," the god of Memphis. The sacred Ram of Mendes was called "the life of Ra.” Three other sacred Rams are mentioned, "the soul of Osiris," "the soul of Shu," and "the soul of Chepra." They were also conceived as united in one, who is represented with four heads, and bears the name of Shefthat, Primeval Force. This name I believe to be comparatively modern, and to bear the impress of pantheistic speculation rather than of mythology; but the word Ba, which means a ram, also means soul; so that here again there is every probability that the god originated, like so many others, in homonymous metaphor. The encouragement given to his worship by the Ptolemies is circumstantially exhibited in the great tablet of Mendes, published by M. Mariette, and translated by Brugsch-Bey.3 2 Materialism. If Pantheism strongly contributed to the development of this animal worship and to all the superstition therewith connected, it also led to simple Materialism. The hymns at Dendera in honour of the goddess Hathor irresistibly remind one of the opening of the poem of 1 Or, according to another text, "of Seb." 2 Monumens divers, pl. 43, 44. 3 Zeitschrift, 1875, p. 33. An English version has been pub lished in the "Records of the Past." Lucretius. Hathor, like the mother of the Aeneadae, is "sole mistress of the nature of things, and without her nothing rises up into the divine borders of light, nothing grows to be glad or lovely" "through her every kind of living thing is conceived, rises up and beholds the light of the sun.”1 But we know the 2 Roman poet's apology for these poetical conceptions, "however well and beautifully they may be set forth." "If any one thinks proper to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and chooses rather to misuse the name of Bacchus than to utter the term that belongs to that 1 Per te genus omne animantum Exoritur neque fit laetum neque amabile quicquam, &c. I do not quote these lines to prove that the hymns of Dendera are atheistic or epicurean, but that they are not inconsistent with an entire disbelief in religion. All these hymns are absolutely epi curean. 2 Hic siquis mare Neptunum Cereremque vocare Constituit fruges et Bacchi nomine abuti Ib. ii. 652-657. liquor, let us allow him to declare that the earth is mother of the gods, if he only forbear in earnest to stain his mind with foul religion." Man had formerly been led to associate the earth and sun and sky with the notion of infinite power behind those phenomena; he now retraced his steps and recognized in the universe nothing but the mere phenomena. The heathen Plutarch and the Christian Origen equally give evidence of this atheistical interpretation put upon the myths of Osiris and Isis. Plutarch protests against the habit of explaining away the very nature of the gods by resolving it, as it were, into mere blasts of wind, or streams of rivers, and the like, such as making Dionysos to be wine and Hephaistos fire. We might suppose that Plutarch is simply alluding to Greek speculation, but it is certain that the Egyptian texts of the late period are in the habit of substituting the name of a god for a physical object, such as Seb for the earth, Shu for the air, and so on. Origen, as a Christian apologist, sees no advantage to be gained by his adversaries in giving an allegorical interpretation to Osiris and Isis, "for they will nevertheless teach us to offer divine worship to cold water and the earth, which is subject to men and all the animal creation." The transformation of the Egyptian religion is nowhere more apparent than in the view of the life. beyond the grave which is exhibited on a tablet which has already been referred to, that of the wife of R |