alent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood,
... people asked themselves the question, Why is ~Zeus~ called
~Kronides~? And the natural and almost inevitable answer was, Because
he is the son, the offspring of a more ancient god, ~Kronos~. This may
be a very old myth in Greece; but the misunderstanding which gave rise
to it could have happened in Greece only. We cannot expect, therefore,
a god ~Kronos~ in the Veda.' To expect Greek in the Veda would
certainly be sanguine. 'When this myth of ~Kronos~ had once been
started, it would roll on irresistibly. If ~Zeus~ had once a father
called ~Kronos~, ~Kronos~ must have a wife.' It is added, as
confirmation, that 'the name of ~Kronides~ belongs originally to Zeus
only, and not to his later' (in Hesiod elder) 'brothers, Poseidon and
Hades.'[47]

Mr. Mueller says, in his famous essay on 'Comparative Mythology'[48]:
'How can we imagine that a few generations before that time' (the age
of Solon) 'the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were
adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Kronos,--of
Kronos eating his children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive
his whole progeny? Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America, we
hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.' We have found a good
deal of the sort in Africa and America, where it seems not out of
place.

One objection to Mr. Mueller's theory is, that it makes the mystery no
clearer. When Greeks were so advanced in Hellenism that their own
early language had become obsolete and obscure, they invented the god
~Kronos~, to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it)
~Kronides~, son of ~Kronos~. But why did they tell such savage and
revolting stories about the god they had invented? Mr. Mueller only
says the myth 'would roll on irresistibly.' But why did the rolling
myth gather such very strange moss? That is the problem; and while Mr.
Mueller's hypothesis accounts for the existence of a god called
~Kronos~, it does not even attempt to show how full-blown Greeks came
to believe such hideous stories about the god.

* * * * *

This theory, therefore, is of no practical service. The theory of
Adalbert Kuhn, one of the most famous of Sanskrit scholars, and author
of _Die Herabkunft des Feuers_, is directly opposed to the ideas of
Mr. Mueller. In Cronus, Mr. Mueller recognises a god who could only have
come into being among Greeks, when the Greeks had