conception is represented as coming _after_ the impersonal conception; and through such transformation of the impersonal into the personal, Prof. Max Müller considers ancient myths to have arisen. How are these propositions reconcilable? One of two things must be said:--If originally there were none of these abstract nouns, then the earliest statements respecting the daily course of Nature were made in concrete terms--the personal elements of the myth were the primitive elements, and the impersonal expressions which are their equivalents came later. If this is not admitted, then it must be held that, until after there arose these abstract nouns, there were no current statements at all respecting these most conspicuous objects and changes which the heavens and the earth present; and that the abstract nouns having been somehow formed, and rightly formed, and used without personal meanings, afterward became personalized--a process the reverse of that which characterizes early linguistic progress. No such contradictions occur if we interpret myths after the manner that has been indicated. Nay, besides escaping contradictions, we meet with unexpected solutions. The moment we try it, the key unlocks for us with ease what seems a quite inexplicable fact, which the current hypothesis takes as one of its postulates. Speaking of such words as sky and earth, dew and rain, rivers and mountains, as well as of the abstract nouns above named, Prof. Max Müller says--"Now in ancient languages every one of these words had necessarily a termination expressive of gender, and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so that these names received not only an individual, but a sexual character. There was no substantive which was not either masculine or feminine; neuters being of later growth, and distinguishable chiefly in the nominative." (_Chips_, vol. ii., p. 55.) And this alleged necessity for a masculine or feminine implication is assigned as a part of the reason why these abstract nouns and collective nouns became personalized. But should not a true theory of these first steps in the evolution of thought and language show us how it happened that men acquired the seemingly-strange habit of so framing their words for sky, earth, dew, rain, etc., as to make them indicative of sex? Or, at any rate, must it not be admitted that an interpretation which, instead of assuming this habit to be "necessary," shows us how it results, thereby acquires an additional claim to acceptance? The interpretation I have indicated does this. If men and women are habitually nicknamed, and if defects of language lead their descendants to regard themselves as descendants of the things from which the names were taken, then masculine or feminine genders will be ascribed to these things according as the ancestors named after them were men or women. If a beautiful maiden known metaphorically as "the Dawn," afterwards becomes the