But the sun is not only a golden ball, but it is also a shining stone; and here at the outset we tell our secret: the sun is the true Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all to gold, that gives health, that fills with joy. In primeval times, our rude forefathers were puzzled how to explain the nature of sun and moon and stars, and they thought they had hit on the interpretation of the phenomenon when they said that the stars were diamonds stuck in the heavenly vault, and that the sun was a luminous stone, a carbuncle; and the moon a pearl or silver disk. Even the classic writers had not shaken off this notion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus, all speak of the sun as a glowing stone,[27] and Orpheus[28] calls the opal the sunstone, because of its analogy to that shining ball. So Pliny also.[29] The old Norse spoke of the stars as the “gemstones of heaven,” so did the Anglo-Saxons.[30] But perhaps the clearest idea we can have of the old cosmogony is from the pictures preserved to us of the world of the dwarfs. When a superior conception of the universe was general, then the old heathen idea sank, and what had been told of the world of men was referred to the underground world, peopled by the dwarfs, who were the representatives of the early race conquered by the Britons, and by Norse and Teuton, a race probably of Turanian origin. Our British and Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian forefathers knew of the cosmogony of the conquered race, and came to suppose that they inhabited another world to them, a world of which the vault that overarched it was set with precious stones; and as the aboriginal inhabitants were driven to live in caves, or in huts heaped over with turf so as to be like mounds, they regarded them as a subterranean people, and their world to be underground. In a multitude of stories the trolls or dwarfs are said to live in tumuli or cairns. This is nothing more than that their hovels were made of sticks stuck in the ground, gathered together in the middle and turfed over. The Lapp hut, even the Icelandic farmhouse, look like grass mounds. In many tales we hear of human children carried off by the dwarfs, and when these children are recovered they tell of a world in which they have been where the light is given by diamonds and a great carbuncle set in a stony black vault.