* Suidas, His authority is Dionysius of Chalcis 200 BC, See "Primitive Marriage in Bengal," Asiatic Quarterly, June, 1886. The other loves of Apollo are numerous, but it may be sufficient to have examined one such story in detail. Where the tale of the amour was not a necessary consequence of the genealogical tendency to connect clans with gods, it was probably, as Roscher observes in the case of Daphne, an Ætiological myth. Many flowers and trees, for example, were nearly connected with the worship and ritual of Apollo; among these were notably the laurel, cypress and hyacinth. It is no longer possible to do more than conjecture why each of these plants was thus favoured, though it is a plausible guess that the god attracted into his service various local tree-worships and plant-worships. People would ask why the deity was associated with the flowers and boughs, and the answer would be readily developed on the familiar lines of nature-myth. The laurel is dear to the god because the laurel was once a girl whom he pursued with his love, and who, to escape his embraces, became a tree. The hyacinth and cypress were beautiful youths, dear to Apollo, and accidentally slain by him in sport. After their death they became flowers. Such myths of metamorphoses, as has been shown, are an universal growth of savage fancy, and spring from the want of a sense of difference between men and things.* The legend of Apollo has only been slightly sketched, but it is obvious that many elements from many quarters enter into the sum of his myths and rites.** If Apollo was originally the sun-god, it is certain that his influence on human life and society was as wide and beneficent as that of the sun itself. He presides over health and medicine, and over purity of body and soul. He is the god of song, and the hexameter, which first resounded in his temples, uttered its latest word in the melancholy music of the last oracle from Delphi:-- Say to the king that the beautiful fane hath fallen asunder, Phoebus no more hath a sheltering roof nor a sacred cell, And the holy laurels are broken and wasted, and hushed is the wonder Of water that spake as it flowed from the deeps of the Delphian well. * See "Nature-Myths," antea. Schwartz, as usual, takes Daphne to be connected, not with the dawn, but with lightning. "Es ist der Gewitter-baum." Der Ursprung der Mythologie, Berlin, 1860, pg. 160-162. ** For the influence of Apollo-worship on Greek civilisation, see Curtius's History qf Greece, English transl., vol. i. For a theory that Apollo answers to Mitra among "the Arians of Iran," see Duncker's History of Greece, vol, i. 173.