his mother, or more correctly his father’s wife. Reuben is a figure homogeneous to Jacob, and therefore belongs to the night, as we discover most certainly from the circumstance that in the battle of the ‘Possessors of arrows’ against Joseph he is on the side of the latter and tries to save him, while Judah, a solar man, proposes to sell Joseph (Gen. XXXVII. 21, 26). In a myth such sympathy indicates that the subject and object of it are at all events not hostile figures: we have already seen this in the relations between Isaac and Esau and between Rebekah and Jacob. However, Reuben here seems not to be the night in general, but the twilight which forms the beginning and the end of the night, if we attach weight to the fact that Reuben is Jacob’s son. Though unimportant and not even necessary for the appreciation of the myth, this is very probable. The Sun is the mother of the Twilight, for the twilight proceeds from the sun. So when at the end of the night the morning-darkness gives way to the sun or dawn and disappears in them, Reuben and Bilhah are united. Whatever part the twilight may play here, it is at least clear that this myth speaks of the union of Night with its mother Day: when Night gives place to Day, from whose womb it was born but yesterday, then the myth says ‘Reuben is marrying his mother.’ § 14. But before we continue the chapter on love and sexual union, the materials of which are mainly drawn from the history of Jacob’s family, it is desirable to insert some remarks on the mythological significance of that family. Our mythological observation leads to the following result. From its first commencement the myth speaks of _twelve children_ of Jacob, i.e. of the dark night-sky. These children, on whose names the myth lays no stress, can hardly be anything else than the shining troop which has its home in the night-sky—the Moon and the Eleven Stars (comp. Gen. XXXVII. 9, achad ʿâsâr kôkhâbhîm). These are Jacob’s children, though in a different sense from that in which Isaac is the son of Abraham, or Joseph the son of Rachel. In these latter instances the conception of a parental and filial relation was the result of the impression produced upon the creators of myths by constant succession; in the case of Jacob’s sons it is only meant that the eleven stars and the moon together form the Family of the Night-sky. This conception having once been grasped, there was nothing to hinder creators of myths from speaking of a son of Jacob who did not belong to that Family. And if there were a myth which said that Jacob fought with his son, as is said of Abraham, then we could not seek such a son in the family of stars which fills Jacob’s house. It is a general rule which must never be lost out of sight in the investigation of myths, that mythology does not present a _system_, whose separate elements are comprehensive results, or abstractions from _continuous_ observation of nature. What