in Campania paint the god whom they honour under the name of Hebon. These differences of age relate to the sun, who seems to be a tender child at the winter solstice, such as the Egyptians represent him on a certain day [December 25th], when they bring forth from an obscure nook of their sanctuary his infantine image, because, the day being then at the shortest, the god seems yet to be but a feeble infant: gradually growing from this moment, he arrives, by degrees, at the vernal equinox, under the form of a young man, of which his images at that time bear the appearance; then he arrives at his maturity, indicated by the tufted beard with which the images which represent him at the summer solstice are adorned, the day having then taken all the increase of which it is susceptible. Lastly, he decreases insensibly, and arrives at his old age, pictured by the state of decrepitude in which he is portrayed in the images.” Yao, Iao, or Adonis was of Semitic origin, although widely worshipped in Greece, and generally identified with Zeus, whose Semitic counterpart he really was, although himself a saviour sun-god. Yao, to the Phœnicians and Chaldeans, was as Zeus and Prometheus to the Greeks, and represented the whole annual circuit, though he was always called by the Greeks specially the god of the autumn, on account of his having, at that period, to part from his lover, Aphrodite (Venus), for six months; and thus there was usually a certain melancholy attached to his worship, the oracle of the Klarion Apollon terming him the darling or tender Yao (Ιαω), god of the autumn. As the Greek power and civilisation declined and the Roman advanced, the god Yao, like his counterpart Iēs, became one of the most popular of the Roman deities, being worshipped under the name Adonis in every city of Italy; and the mythological horizon became crowded with gods and demi-gods of every description, until, at length, it became a very difficult matter to determine who was a god and who was not worthy of that distinction; for the Roman Emperors were invariably deified, as well as others of less degree. The old Aryan drama, however, was preserved throughout in the worship of the principal gods, and has even been perpetuated in the reformed religion of the Semitic communistic enthusiast, Yahoshua, which became, soon after the commencement of our era, the popular religious system of the whole of Europe.