9. The astronomical tendencies of the new religion fully assert themselves in the third group of divinities. They are simply the five planets then known and identified with various deities of the old creed, to whom they are, so to speak, assigned as their own particular provinces. Thus NIN-DAR (also called NINIP or NINEB), originally another name or form of the Sun (see p. 172), becomes the ruler of the most distant planet, the one we now call Saturn; the old favorite, Meridug, under the Semitized name of MARDUK, rules the planet Jupiter. It is he whom later Hebrew writers have called MERODACH, the name we find in the Bible. The planet Mars belongs to NERGAL, the warrior-god, and Mercury to NEBO, more properly NABU, the "messenger of the gods" and the special patron of astronomy, while the planet Venus is under the sway of a feminine deity, the goddess ISHTAR, one of the most important and popular on the list. But of her more anon. She leads us to the consideration of a very essential and characteristic feature of the Chaldeo-Babylonian religion, common, moreover, to all Oriental heathen religions, especially the Semitic ones. 10. There is a distinction--the distinction of sex--which runs through the whole of animated nature, dividing all things that have life into two separate halves--male and female--halves most different in their qualities, often opposite, almost hostile, yet eternally dependent on each other, neither being complete or perfect, or indeed able to exist without the other. Separated by contrast, yet drawn together by an irresistible sympathy which results in the closest union, that of love and affection, the two sexes still go through life together, together do the work of the world. What the one has not or has in an insufficient degree it finds in its counterpart, and it is only their union which makes of the world a whole thing, full, rounded, harmonious. The masculine nature, active, strong, and somewhat stern, even when merciful and bounteous, inclined to boisterousness and violence and often to cruelty, is well set off, or rather completed and moderated, by the feminine nature, not less active, but more quietly so, dispensing gentle influences, open to milder moods, more uniformly soft in feeling and manner. [Illustration: 60.--A BUST INSCRIBED WITH THE NAME OF NEBO. (British Museum.)]