Jupiter was no more called Jupiter by accident, than the Polynesian _Maui_, the Samoyede _Num_, or the Chinese _Tien_.(42) If we can discover the original meaning of these names, we have reached the first ground of their later growth. I do not say that, if we can explain the first purpose of the mythological names, we have solved the whole riddle of mythology, but I maintain that we have gained firm ground. I maintain that every true etymology gives us an historical fact, because the first giving of a name was an historical fact, and an historical fact of the greatest importance for the later development of ancient ideas. Think only of this one fact, which no one would now venture to doubt, that the supreme deity of the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, is called by the same name as the supreme deity of the earliest Aryan settlers in India. Does not this one fact draw away the curtain from the dark ages of antiquity, and open before our eyes an horizon which we can hardly measure by years? The Greek _Zeus_ is the same word as the Latin _Ju_ in _Jupiter_, as the German _Tiu_; and all these were merely dialectic varieties of the Vedic _Dyaus_.(43) Now _dyaus_ in Sanskrit is the name of the sky, if used as a feminine; if used as a masculine, as it is still in the Veda, it is the sky as a man or as a god—it is Zeus, the father of gods and men. You know, of course, that the whole language of ancient India is but a sister dialect of Greek, Latin, of German, Keltic, and Slavonic, and that if the Greek says _es-ti_, he is, if the Roman says _est_, the German _ist_, the Slave _yesté_, the Hindu, three thousand years ago, said _as-ti_, he is. This _as-ti_ is a compound of a root _as_, to be, and the pronoun _ti_. The root meant originally _to breathe_, and dwindled down after a time to the meaning of _to be_. All this must have happened before a single Greek or German reached the shores of Europe, and before a single Brahman descended into the plains of India. At that distant time we must place the gradual growth of language and ideas, of a language which we are still speaking, of ideas which we are still thinking; and at the same time only can we explain the framing of those names which were the first attempts at grasping supernatural powers, which became in time the names of the deities of the ancient world, the heroes of mythology, the chief actors in many a legend, nay, some of which have survived in the nursery tales of our own time.(44)