For the first traces therefore of anything like what is now understood by the term religion, we must look beyond the vague superstitions of savages, at the historical records of civilised nations. As civilisation advanced population multiplied, and rude tribes of hunters were amalgamated into agricultural communities and powerful empires, in which a leisured and cultured class arose, to whom the old superstitions were no longer sufficient. They had to enlarge their ‘working hypothesis’ from the worship of stocks and stones and fear of ghosts, to take in a multitude of new facts and ideas, and specially those relating to natural phenomena which had roused their curiosity, or become important to them as matters of practical utility. The establishment of an hereditary caste of priests accelerated this evolution of religious ideas, and from time to time recorded its progress. The oldest of such records are those of Egypt and Chaldæa, where the fertility of alluvial valleys watered by great rivers had led to the earliest development of a high civilisation. The records also of the Chinese, Hindoos, Persians, and other nations take us a long way back towards the origins of religions. In all cases we find them identical with the first origins of science, and taking the form of attempted explanations of natural phenomena, by the theory of deified objects and powers of nature. In the Vedas we see this in the simplest form, where the gods are simply personifications of the heavens, earth, sun, moon, dawn, and so forth; and where we should say the red glow of morning announces the rising of the sun, they express it that Aurora blushes at the approach of her lover the mighty Sun-god. It is very interesting to observe how the old Chaldæan legend of the creation of the world has been modified in the far later Jewish edition of it in Genesis, to adapt it to monotheistic ideas. The Chaldæan legend begins, like that of Genesis, with an ‘earth without form and void,’ and darkness on the chaotic deep. In each legend the Spirit of God, called Absu in the Chaldæan, moves on the face of the waters, and they are gathered together and separated from the land. But here a difference begins: in the original Chaldæan legend ‘the great gods were then made; the gods Lakman and Lakmana caused themselves to come forth; the gods Assur and Kesar were made; the gods Anu, Bel, and Hea were born.’