Professor Hardwicke says: 

“All these and similar traditions are but mocking satires of the old Hebrew story—­jarred and broken notes of the same strain; but with all their exaggerations they intimate how in the background of man’s vision lay a paradise of holy joy—­a paradise secured from every kind of profanation, and made inaccessible to the guilty; a paradise full of objects that were calculated to delight the senses and to elevate the mind a paradise that granted to its tenant rich and rare immunities, and that fed with its perennial streams the tree of life and immortality.”

To quote again from the writer in the Edinburgh Review, already cited;

“Its undoubted antiquity, no less than its extraordinary diffusion, evidences that it must have been, as it may be said to be still in unchristianized lands, emblematical of some fundamental doctrine or mystery.  The reader will not have failed to observe that it is most usually associated with water; it was ‘the key of the Nile,’ that mystical instrument by means of which, in the popular judgment of his Egyptian devotees, Osiris produced the annual revivifying inundations of the sacred stream; it is discernible in that mysterious pitcher or vase portrayed on the brazen table of Bembus, before-mentioned, with its four lips discharging as many streams of water in opposite directions; it was the emblem of the water-deities of the Babylonians in the East and of the Gothic nations in the West, as well as that of the rain-deities respectively of the mixed population in America.  We have seen with what peculiar rites the symbol was honored by those widely separated races in the western hemisphere; and the monumental slabs of Nineveh, now in the museums of London and Paris, show us how it was similarly honored by the successors of the Chaldees in the eastern. . . .

Ancient Irish cross—­pre-Christian—&s
hy;KILNABOY.

“In Egypt, Assyria, and Britain it was emblematical of creative power and eternity; in India, China, and Scandinavia, of heaven and immortality; in the two Americas, of rejuvenescence and freedom from physical suffering; while in both hemispheres it was the common symbol of the resurrection, or ‘the sign of the life to come;’ and, finally, in all heathen communities, without exception, it was the emphatic type, the sole enduring evidence, of the Divine Unity.  This circumstance alone determines its extreme antiquity—­an antiquity, in all likelihood, long antecedent to the foundation of either of the three great systems of religion in the East.  And, lastly, we have seen how, as a rule, it is found in conjunction with a stream or streams of water, with exuberant vegetation, and with a bill or a mountainous region—­in a word, with a land of beauty, fertility, and joy.  Thus it was expressed upon those circular and sacred cakes of the Egyptians, composed of the richest materials-of flour, of honey, of milk—­and with which