tle particular we may partly clear up at once,
though it will meet us again in another connection. It will serve as a
sidelight to our legendary scenes. In English, French, Italian, Latin,
and Greek, the moon is feminine; but in all the Teutonic tongues the
moon is masculine. Which of the twain is its true gender? We go
back to the Sanskrit for an answer. Professor Max Mueller rightly
says, "It is no longer denied that for throwing light on some of the
darkest problems that have to be solved by the student of language,
nothing is so useful as a critical study of Sanskrit." [9] Here the
word for the moon is _mas_, which is masculine. Mark how even
what Hamlet calls "words, words, words" lend their weight and
value to the adjustment of this great argument. The very moon is
masculine, and, like Wordsworth's child, is "father of the man."

If a bisexous moon seem an anomaly, perhaps the suggestion of
Jamieson will account for the hermaphrodism: "The moon, it has
been said, was viewed as of the masculine gender in respect of the
earth, whose husband he was supposed to be; but as a female in
relation to the sun, as being his spouse." [10] Here, also, we find a
clue to the origin of this myth. If modern science, discovering the
moon's inferiority to the sun, call the former feminine, ancient
nescience, supposing the sun to be inferior to the moon, called the
latter masculine. The sun, incomparable in splendour, invariable in
aspect and motion, to the unaided eye immaculate in surface, too
dazzling to permit prolonged observation, and shining in the
daytime, when the mind was occupied with the duties of pastoral,
agricultural, or commercial life, was to the ancient simply an object
of wonder as a glory, and of worship as a god. The moon, on the
contrary, whose mildness of lustre enticed attention, whose phases
were an embodiment of change, whose strange spots seemed
shadowy pictures of things and beings terrestrial, whose appearance
amid the darkness of night was so welcome, and who came to men
susceptible, from the influences of quiet and gloom, of superstitious
imaginings, from the very beginning grew into a familiar spirit of
kindred form with their own, and though regarded as the
subordinate and wife of the sun, was reverenced as the superior and
husband of the earth. With the transmission of this myth began its
transmutation. From the moon being a man, it became a man's
abode: with some it was the world whence human spiri