We well know the theological meaning of the latter word—the subterranean place to which the souls of the dead go; but there is no doubt that it originally denoted ‘a gloomy pit, never lighted by the sun,’ or ‘darkness’ in general. Therefore Tartarus figures in Mythology as father of Typhon and Echidna, and therefore Nyx is his daughter. Then it agrees well with nomadic ideas that Tartarus is called ‘father of waters and springs,’ and that he bears the epithet ‘the first born’ (πρωτόγονος). On Hebrew ground also we meet a similar transition. In Job XXXVI. 20, the word laylâ ‘night’ is used quite in the sense of ‘nether world;’ which is true also of ṣalmâweth, denoting ‘darkness’ in general, and used only secondarily with special reference to Orcus. § 4. We have above just touched the confines of religious history, though it was strictly speaking, only a border territory of Mythology, which ought not to be confounded with religious history. But we must here allow ourselves an excursion into the neighbouring territory. For it ought not to pass unnoticed that, as the myth which has the night-sky in its foreground always precedes that which has the bright sky of day in its centre, the former corresponding to the nomadic, the latter to the settled agricultural life, the same sequence can also be observed in the history of religion. There are nations, which, when already standing at the nomadic stage, work out for themselves a theistic religion. As theistic religion always grows up out of the elements of myths, the religion of Nomadism must be essentially a worship of the night-heaven. Then, when the progress to the agricultural stage works the revolution in man’s ideas of the world, and in the relation of his mind to external nature, of which I spoke above, when he cleaves more to the Sun and pays his reverence to him, then the worship of the nocturnal starry or overclouded rainy heaven is naturally supplanted by one of the diurnal heaven and the sun, and only residua of the ancient ideas and the ancient objects of worship are propagated into the new epoch, sometimes continuing and remaining in force unmodified, and sometimes interpreted anew in the sense of the new system. The religion and the worship of the nomad stand to those of the agriculturist in the same relation of historical succession as the two similar stages of mythology to each other. At the later stage, the elements of solar religion can undoubtedly stand peacefully side by side with the residua of the earlier stage of religion. Similarly, when nomads have relations with townsmen who have a solar religion already powerfully developed, many elements of the solar worship may find their way into the nomadic religion; of which the well-known accounts of the religion of some Arabic Beduin tribes furnish plenty of examples. To this an outside observer may probably reduce the report brought by William Gifford Palgrave, the daring explorer of Central Arabia, of the adoration of the