ry other time, the alone really pressing
ones. They express the real experiences of living men, who lay under an
inner necessity to utter such a song, relieving themselves by the effort
and ministering a means of relief to others in a like situation of soul.

PSYCHE (i. e. the soul), in the later Greek mythology the youngest
of three daughters of a king, and of such beauty as to eclipse the
attractions and awake the jealousy of Venus, the goddess of beauty, who
in consequence sent Cupid, her son, to inspire her with love for a
hideous monster, and so compass her ruin. Cupid, fascinated with her
himself, spirited her away to a palace furnished with every delight, but
instead of delivering her over to the monster, visited her himself at
night as her husband, and left her before daybreak in the morning,
because she must on no account know who he was. Here her sisters came to
see her, and in their jealousy persuaded her to assure herself that it
was not a monster that she slept with, so that she lit a lamp the next
night to discover, when a drop of oil from it fell on his shoulder as he
lay asleep beside her, upon which he at a bound started up and vanished
out of sight. She thereupon gave way to a long wail of lamentation and
set off a-wandering over the wide world in search of her lost love, till
she came to the palace of Venus, her arch-enemy, who seized on her person
and made her her slave, subjecting her to a series of services, all of
which she accomplished to the letter, so that Venus was obliged to relent
and consent that, in the presence of all the gods of Olympus, Cupid and
she should be united in immortal wedlock. It is the story of the trials
of the soul to achieve immortality. See "Stories from the Greek
Mythology," by the Editor.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, SOCIETY FOR, a society founded in 1882 to
inquire into the phenomena of spiritualism and kindred subjects of a
recondite kind, the subject of Telepathy having engaged recently a good
deal of attention.

PTOLEMAIC SYSTEM, the highly complex system of astronomy ascribed to
Claudius Ptolemy, which assumed that the earth was the centre of a sphere
which carried the heavenly bodies along in its daily revolution,
accounted for the revolutions of the sun and moon by supposing they moved
in eccentric circles round the earth, and regarded the planets as moving
in epicycles round a point which itself revolved in an eccentric circle
round the earth like the sun and m