there are such thoughts and that some day you will want to know more about them. While some myths were thus raised to religious systems, there were many which remained in the form of legends and stories. In the course of many generations, these stories were told over again and again so that many changes crept into them and many additions were made. Sometimes the effect of these changes was to make a story cruder, sometimes the complexity of a story was increased, and sometimes it became more interesting and beautiful. Stories which have been changed or added to by the people in this way are called _variants_ of the same story. Owing to these facts mythology has been divided into two great sections. That which has risen to the dignity of a religion is called culture-lore, and that which has remained always in the form of stories and legends is called folk-lore. The first reflects the learning, wisdom and manners of the more intelligent portions of humanity, who developed in advance of the others; and the second the beliefs and customs of the less intelligent. You are probably wondering by this time how all this vast array of myths has come down to us from the long ago past. Much of it has been preserved in ancient books like the “Rig Veda” in India, which is thought to be about four thousand years old, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer in Greece, about three thousand years old and many others. These books existed in manuscript for many hundreds of years. Since the invention of printing, large numbers of them have been printed and translated into modern languages. Knowledge of ancient myths has also been obtained from monuments and the inscriptions upon them, from paintings on vases and from statues. The folk-lore has for the most part been preserved orally in the stories of the common people, and has been handed down from generation to generation and finally taken down in writing by some one especially interested in collecting the stories, while the myths of the most primitive men are preserved in the survivals of them among the races still remaining uncivilized in various parts of the globe. These have been for several centuries taken down from the mouths of the people, or observed in their customs and recorded by students. Among these less civilized races there are besides crude monuments, and even crude forms of writing by means of which primitive men have recorded their own myths.