t and Day, each, has a horse and
a car, and they drive successively one after the other around the world
in twenty-four hours. Night rides first with her steed named Dew-hair,
and every morning as he ends his course he bedews the earth with foam
from his bit. The steed driven by Day is Shining-hair. All the sky and
earth glisten with the light of his mane. Jarnved, the great iron-wood
forest lying to the east of Midgard, is the abode of a race of witches.
One monster witch is the mother of many sons in the form of wolves, two
of which are Skol and Hate. Skol is the wolf that would devour the
maiden Sun, and she daily flies from the maw of the terrible beast, and
the moon-man flies from the wolf Hate.
The philosopher of Samos tells us that the earth is surrounded by hollow
crystalline spheres set one within another, and all revolving at
different rates from east to west about the earth, and that the sun is
set in one of these spheres and the moon in another.
The philosopher of civilization tells us that the sun is an incandescent
globe, one of the millions afloat in space. About this globe the planets
revolve, and the sun and planets and moons were formed from nebulous
matter by the gradual segregation of their particles controlled by the
laws of gravity, motion, and affinity.
The sun, traveling by an appointed way across the heavens with the
never-ending succession of day and night, and the ever-recurring train
of seasons, is one of the subjects of every philosophy. Among all
peoples, in all times, there is an explanation of these phenomena, but
in the lowest stage, way down in savagery, how few the facts discerned,
how vague the discriminations made, how superficial the resemblances by
which the phenomena are classified! In this stage of culture, all the
daily and monthly and yearly phenomena which come as the direct result
of the movements of the heavenly bodies are interpreted as the doings of
some one--some god acts. In civilization the philosopher presents us the
science of astronomy with all its accumulated facts of magnitude, and
weights, and orbits, and distances, and velocities--with all the nice
discriminations of absolute, relative, and apparent motions; and all
these facts he is endeavoring to classify in homologic categories, and
the evolutions and revolutions of the heavenly bodies are explained as
an orderly succession of events.
_Rain._--The _Shoshoni_ philosopher believes the domed firmament to b
|