the career of Herakles precedes his career as a god, so far as the name gives evidence." "If this treatise," Dr. Farnell remarks in his preface, "is censured as a revival of 'Euhemerism,' it will only be censured on this ground by those who have not followed recent researches in anthropology and the comparative study of Saga." He objects to the school which "would interpret all Homer's heroes and heroines as faded gods and goddesses, and all heroic saga as merely the secularization of, ἱερὸς λόγος or of sacred chronicles that attached to the worship of temples and underground shrines." "We ought to maintain the principle, as a new and much needed axiom in the procedure of folk-lore, that no story should be relegated to the realm of cosmic or celestial mythology that can reasonably be explained on the lines of human life." "It is a common error of current mythologic theory to assign to prehistoric names a deeper and more illuminating significance than we do to the historic." "The students of mythology have frequent need of the caution that this significance or status of a mythic personality is not necessarily determined by that of his parents or spouse. A mortal king may marry a goddess, or may be the son of a deity." Writing of Asklepios he remarks: "The various interpretations of his divinity reflect the passing fashions of mythic speculation that have prevailed in the last and still prevail in the present generation, some writers explaining him as originally a god of the air, others of the storm or the lightning, others of the sun. None of these meteorologic theories are worth present consideration." It was time that these words of wisdom, directed against some schools of interpretation, should be spoken. The book must be in the hands of all who are interested in the study of mythology.
This book—called a reprint but in reality a new book—is indeed welcome. We owe it to our Imperial duties—belated as it
