krakens and sea-serpents, doubtless, accompanied them.  There stood that unfinished world reeking with charcoal fumes, its soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic atmosphere.  Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not,—­nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier.  No lark or linnet or redbreast or mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times.  The world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the needs of its future biped passengers.  The embryotic earth was then truly a Niflheim, or Mistland,—­a dun, fuming region.  Those were the days, perhaps, when Nox reigned, and the great mundane egg was hatching in the oven-like heat, from which the winged boy Eros leaped forth, “his back glittering with golden plumes, and swift as eddying air.”  We have it on good authority, that the Adirondack Mountains of New York, and the Grampian Hills of Scotland, where Norval was to feed his flocks, had already upheaved their bare backs from the boiling caldrons of the sea, thus stealing a march on the Alps and many other more famous mountains.

How opposite and remote from each other are the mythologic ages and the nineteenth century!  The critical and scientific spirit of the one is in strange contrast with the credulous, blindly reverent spirit of the other.  Mythology delegated the government of the world to inferior deities, the subjects of an omnipotent Fate or Necessity; while, to show how extremes meet, mere science delegates it to chemical and physiological agencies, and ends, like the mythic cosmogonies, in some irrepressible spontaneous impulse of matter to develope itself in the ever-changing forms of the visible universe.  Myriads of gods were the actors in “the rushing metamorphosis” of the old myth-haunted Nature; while chemic and elemental forces perform the same parts in the masquerade of the modern Phasis.  Both mythology and science, therefore, stick fast in secondary causes.

Myths are the religion of youth, and of primitive, unsophisticated nations; while science may be called the religion of the mature man, full of experience and immersed in the actual.  The Positivism of Comte, like the old myth-worship, sets up for its deity human nature idealized, adorned with genius and virtue.  The Positivist worships virtuous human nature, conditioned and limited as it is; while the Mythist worshipped it reflected on the outer world and endowed with supernatural attributes, clothed with mist-caps and wishing-caps that gave it dominion over space and time.  The restless, glittering, whimsical sprites of fairy mythology, that were believed of old to have so large a share in shaping the course of Nature and of human life, have vanished from the