In the first Paper here reprinted this supposition was put forward; and in the course of following, as above stated, the clue afforded by it, the various subjects discussed in successive Papers claimed always more insistently my attention, as by degrees detached pieces of information concerning the calendars of ancient nations came to hand, and fitted themselves, like the pieces of a dissected map, into one simple chronological scheme. The study of calendars marked by Zodiacal constellations necessitates an acquaintance with the position of those constellations as they were to be observed through the many ages during which they held the important office of presiding over the year and its changing seasons. Such acquaintanceship would have involved very careful and accurate calculations were it not that, by the help of a precessional globe, it was possible by easy mechanical adjustment to _see_, without the trouble of thinking them out, what were the changes produced in the scenery of nightly skies, millennium after millennium, by the slow apparent revolution of the “Poles of heaven” through the constellations--a revolution referred to by English astronomers as “the precession of the equinoxes,” and more graphically and epigrammatically by French astronomers as “le mouvement des fixes.” In the second part of this book diagrams have been given, made from a precessional globe, and in the explanatory notes which accompany the Plates attention has been directed, not only to the chronological problems which may be discussed with great advantage, as I believe, by the help of such a globe, but also to various astronomical explanations of ancient myths which occurred to me in the course of studying the position of Zodiacal and extra-Zodiacal constellations at different ages of the world’s history. I can only read Classic and Oriental myths in translations, and I feel very sure that if any of the astronomic explanations here suggested for ancient legends should prove to be the right ones, scholars versed in the original languages in which these legends were written, if they supplement their linguistic knowledge by astronomic considerations, will be able quickly and with ease to develop the suggested explanations much further than it has been possible for me to do; and explanations of other astronomic myths--astronomic, that is, and not merely solar myths--will doubtless come to their minds as they follow similar lines of enquiry. The steps by which travellers arrive at a far-reaching view are often very steep and arduous. I fear that many readers of this book will find the separate Papers in it dull and technical in themselves; but if they be considered only as steep and roughly-cut steps leading up to vantage points of chronological and historical observation, I believe that the ruggedness of the path will soon be forgotten in the absorbing interest of the results to be obtained by following it. CONTENTS PART I