which seeks to explain how the old myths, some poetical, many disgusting, and all impossible, originated, is a modern study which has fascinated a large number of learned scholars. The old notion that they were merely allegorical forms of representing facts and phenomena is not tenable in view of the universality of the legends among the least cultivated races. Professor Max Müller initiated a lively controversy some forty years ago by suggesting that myths were a consequence of language, a disease of language, as Mr. Andrew Lang has termed it. He traced many of the Greek myths to Aryan sources, and insisted that they had developed from the words or phrases used to describe natural phenomena. Thus, for example, he explained the myth of Apollo and Daphne (mentioned on page 9) by supposing that a phrase existed describing the Sun following, or chasing, the Dawn. He even maintained that the Sanskrit Ahana, dawn, was the derivation of Daphne. Words, of course, were invented to convey some mental conception; that conception, while it was intelligible, would (according to Max Müller’s system) be developed into a story. The argument was most ingeniously worked out, but it has not proved capable of satisfying the conditions of the problem. How could it suffice, for instance, to explain the occurrence of almost identical myths treasured by the most degraded and widely separated peoples? The more likely theory is that in a very early stage of the savage mind the untrained imagination tended inevitably to associate the facts of nature with certain monstrous, obscene, and irrational forms. Perhaps the most able exposition of this view, or something like it, expounded within moderate limits, is to be found in an article on Mythology contributed to the “Encyclopædia Britannica” by Mr. Andrew Lang. II PHARMACY IN THE TIME OF THE PHARAOHS “Go up into Gilead and take balm, O virgin daughter of Egypt: in vain dost thou use many medicines; there is no healing for thee.” So wrote the prophet Jeremiah (xlvi, 11), and the passage seems to suggest that Egypt in his time was famous for its medicines. Herodotus, who narrated his travels in Egypt some two or three hundred years later, conveys the same impression, and the records of the papyri which have been deciphered within the last century confirm the opinion.