Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/422

that the earth had been girt by certain belts similar to the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, preventing the radiation of heat, and thereby causing a second canopy of vapours or clouds to gather under the first and to create upon the earth a climate akin to that of a hot-house. Through the rotation of the earth and other causes the belts finally broke up into strips or narrow belts starting from the equator, and through these intervals clouds, which had hid the sight of the sun, rolled away or dropped in the form of snow, and the warm temperature was changed into one of great cold. According to the theory primitive man saw the breaking up of the canopy into the form of belts, which were regarded as huge serpents, and hence arose the legend of the serpent encircling the world, and the worship of that serpent, which is found in every ancient mythology. Asiatic systems of religion tell us that originally man lived in a warm garden. Then suddenly came the change. The serpent, the spirit of evil, drove man out of that paradise, and sent him to a place of cold and snow and long winter and frost. The last Ice Age came upon the world, and drove the nations southward. "The flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life" is suggested to be "the first revelation of the sun through the equatorial slit or opening between the northern and the southern halves of the canopy" (p. 163). "These two halves are the pillars of Hercules." In ten chapters the author leads us through the mythology of the Hindus, Assyrians, and Egyptians, of Greece and Rome, Hercules, Plato, myths of the Amerinds, Russian myths (found, of course, mostly in Russian fairy tales and ballads), and, lastly, Scandinavian myths, and two copious indexes are furnished. This, the latest theory on mythmaking, is just as convincing, or unconvincing, as many other ingenious theories which rest on "airy" hypotheses, and it goes a long way to show how easily the ancient myths lend themselves to plausible interpretations. Nevertheless, there are some extremely interesting chapters in this book dealing with the great influence which geological and atmospheric conditions have had upon human thought and human civilisation. The migrations of the peoples and the incursions of the northern nations are brought into connection with the spread of the Ice Age, and the