necessary when Zoroaster first announced it to the world. To them he boldly appealed for the truth of his mission. The miracles which preceded, those which accompanied, his birth, may be seen in the elaborate account of him prefixed by Anquetil du Perron to his translation of the Zendavesta. Throughout his life, if any faith is to be placed in his biographers, he wrought, or pretended to work, miracles by his magical terms. Yet he exceeded even Odin in the zeal with which he inveighed against the magic of his rivals. Against the magicians his most terrible anathemas were hurled; against them he waged a war of extermination, and justified the hostility by alleging the express command of heaven. But they were the servants of Ahriman, the irreconcilable enemies of Ormuzd—of every thing that is good—of every thing that issues from the benevolent deity. In their hands, magic was sure to become an instrument of evil; but in those of himself and his disciples, it could not fail to be an instrument of happiness. In the former case it must be fatal, in the latter highly useful, to human nature: hence the necessity of destroying in the one case that which should be piously maintained in the other. Such, too, was the conduct of Odin. There was, however, this difference between the two legislators: while the Median regarded women as absolutely impure, and confided the celebration of all his rites, magical or religious, to the men; the Scythian paid peculiar honour to the sex: women were allowed, enjoined, to perform the most solemn, the most awful, ceremonies of the new faith. Yet the men were not excluded from the privilege. There were colleges or fraternities of wizards from the earliest known periods of Scandinavian history, down to the time of Harald Harfager, or even later still. Rognevald, a son of that monarch, was burned to death, with eighty of his associates, on the charge of exercising a magic condemned by Odin, and emanating from the evil powers. The _Solar Liod_, or Song of the Sun, is almost wholly the composition of Sæmund. But then he derived his materials from ancient pagan times.