devoured his heart. As much as he devoured by day, so much grew up again at night. After thirty years Hercules slew this eagle and liberated him."

A myth so all-inclusive as the Prometheus myth offers many interesting problems of origin to the scientific student of mythology, as well as furnishing fascinating material to the symbolical and philosophical interpreters of myths, and perennially fresh "stuff" for poets to make their "dreams on." Prometheus belongs to the large family of culture heroes, who exist in all mythologies of the human race. These interesting personages are always represented as the teachers of the arts of civilization to mankind, and often as the creators or makers of mankind as Prometheus is in some of the later versions of the story. It is not unusual for the culture hero in very primitive myths to be a bird or an animal. Finding themselves possessed of a certain amount of knowledge, "the slow increase of an advancing toil," primitive men set up a hero among fishes or birds or men to whom they liked to think they owed everything, just as some people now like to set up

India as the culture-hero among nations, and trace all the fruits of civilization enjoyed to-day to an ultimate origin in that land of mysterious beginnings.

It is in relation to its origin as a fire-myth that the most ingenious theories have been invented. The great German philologist, Kuhn, has let his imagination run riot in framing a hypothesis in which nature and philology are made to dovetail in so seemingly solid a manner that if it is not true, it is even better than true, and might be called a scientific fairy tale. According to him-fire must have been given in the earliest times to man by nature. There was a burning here and there and man came to know fire and its effects by experience. At the same time he learned how to keep it from going out, and probably he very soon learned also how to produce it. The earliest method of producing fire was by means of two sticks. With one stick primitive man bored into a groove in the other stick or into a circular disc of wood. But he saw besides fire in the sky and believed it to be of the same nature. Its origin must have been similar. There was no lack of necessary wood

in the sky, for there was seen in the configuration of the clouds the great ash-tree of the world. It was supposed that the lightning fell down from this ash-tree, against which a branch twined round it had rubbed until fire was produced in the same way as it was on the earth. Then they saw how fire fell down in the lightning and called it a divine eagle, hawk or woodpecker. Originally, the bird was probably regarded as being itself the lightning. Afterwards it was thought that the bird, which at first perched upon the heavenly ash that produced the fire, brought the fire down from the tree to the earth. After a while the lightning bird became changed into a lightning god, who brought fire and man to earth in the lightning. The Hindoo god of fire, Agni, was often called the golden winged bird. When the divine beings were once thought of as persons, men no longer imagined the fire in the sky to be self-originated on the world tree but regarded it as produced by the gods, who acted in the same manner as the men on earth. The most striking peculiarity of fire was the necessity of constantly kindling it afresh. The Hindoos expressed this

by saying that the god of fire, Agni, had hidden himself in a cave, as they probably conceived of the fire as hidden in the wood. The cave of the fire god is, of course, the storm cloud in the sky, and what brings back the fire but the lightning streak which bores into the cloud as the stick into the disc. The boring process was called in India Manthana, from the root math, " I shake, rub, or produce by rubbing." Then the fire-generating stick was called first matha and later pramantha, and pramantha being related to a verb which came to have the signification "to tear off, snatch to oneself, rob," the fetching back of the god of fire came to be called a robbery of fire. The gods had intended for some reason or other to withhold fire from men; a benefactor of mankind stole it from the gods, and so we reach Prometheus, the robber of fire, for this robbery was called pramâtha. No pramâtha-s is he who loves boring or robbing and from the latter word is formed the Greek word Prometheus.1 With a little more scholarly, philological juggling Prometheus came to have

1 See Steinthal's Essay on Kuhn's theory in Goldziher's "Mythology of the Hebrews."

to the Greeks the significance of the foreknower.

As students of philology frequently differ in the tracing of language relationships, it is wise on the part of the layman not to believe too implicitly in such a perfect hypothesis as this of Kuhn's. Andrew Lang finds much that is fanciful in it, and gives many interesting arguments to prove that the notion of stealing fire came from the actual experiences of primitive men, who, on account of the difficulty in kindling fire, were in the habit of stealing it from their enemies whenever they needed it. The reflection of this custom in a cosmic myth of the lightning and the clouds would account for such a myth as that of Prometheus without aid from philology at all, though the name might have such a philological origin as Kuhn has suggested.

According to Pausanias there was in a street in Panopeus, a building of unbaked brick of no great size, and in it a statue of Pentelican marble which, some say, is Esculapius and others Prometheus. The last adduce the following to confirm their opinion. Some stones lie near the ravine, each