Consider, again, the uncovering of the head. Almost everywhere this has been a sign of reverence, alike in temples and before potentates; and it yet preserves among us some of its original meaning. Whether it rains, hails, or shines, you must keep your head bare while speaking to the monarch; and no one may keep his hat on in a place of worship. As usual, however, this ceremony, at first a submission to gods and kings, has become in process of time a common civility. Once an acknowledgment of another’s unlimited supremacy, the removal of the hat is now a salute accorded to very ordinary persons; and that uncovering originally reserved for entrance into “the house of God” or the residence of the ruler, good manners now dictates on entrance into a labourer’s cottage. Standing, too, as a mark of respect, has undergone like extensions in its application. Shown, by the practice in our churches, to be intermediate between the humiliation signified by kneeling and the self-respect which sitting implies, and used at courts as a form of homage when more active demonstrations of it have been made, this posture is now employed in daily life to show consideration; as seen alike in the attitude of a servant before a master, and in that rising which politeness prescribes on the entrance of a visitor. Many other threads of evidence might have been woven into our argument. As, for example, the significant fact, that if we trace back our still existing law of primogeniture—if we consider it as displayed by Scottish clans, in which not only ownership but government devolved from the beginning on the eldest son of the eldest—if we look further back, and observe that the old titles of lordship, {21} _Signor_, _Seigneur_, _Señor_, _Sire_, _Sieur_, all originally mean senior, or elder—if we go Eastward, and find that _Sheick_ has a like derivation, and that the Oriental names for priests, as _Pir_, for instance, are literally interpreted _old man_—if we note in Hebrew records how far back dates the ascribed superiority of the first-born, how great the authority of elders, and how sacred the memory of patriarchs—and if, then, we remember that among divine titles are “Ancient of Days,” and “Father of Gods and men;”—we see how completely these facts harmonize with the hypothesis, that the aboriginal god is the first man sufficiently great to become a tradition, the earliest whose power and deeds made him remembered; that hence antiquity unavoidably became associated with superiority, and age with nearness in blood to “the powerful one;” that so there naturally arose that domination of the eldest which characterizes the history of all the higher races, and that theory of human degeneracy which even yet survives. We might further dwell on the facts, that _Lord_ signifies high-born, or, as the same root gives a word meaning heaven, possibly heaven-born; that, before it became common, Sir or _Sire_, as well as _Father_, was the