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 on no plea may you remain covered 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," good manners now dictates on entrance into the house of a common labourer. 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, _Signor_, _Seigneur_, _Sennor_, _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 primeval is 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 all history, and that theory of human degeneracy which even yet survives.