The effect of scenery upon religion was treated of in illustration of the general principle of Nature Mysticism--the kinship of man and his physical environment. No less marked has been the effect of scenery upon art. The theme is now somewhat well worn, but its true significance is seldom apprehended. For if art is concerned with the realm of the ideal, or rather, perhaps, with the real in its more ideal aspects, then it follows that whatever has an influence on art has an influence on the spiritual development of the people among whom any particular mode or school of art may-establish itself. An interesting phase of such influence is found in Geikie's suggestion as to the presence of the humorous element in the myths and legends of northern Europe. "The grotesque contours" (he says) "of many craggy slopes where, in the upstanding pinnacles of naked rock, an active imagination sees forms of men and of animals in endless whimsical repetitions, may sometimes have suggested the particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the popular legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical features in a comic light, and threw a playful human interest over the whole face of nature, was a distinctively. Teutonic characteristic." There opens out here an unexplored region for original research. Taking the nature-mystic's mode of experience as a basis for enquiry, how far is the comic a purely subjective affair, concerned only, as Bergson contends, with man, and only found in external phenomena by virtue of their reflecting his affairs; or how far has it a place of its own in the universe at large? To conclude this slight sketch of the Nature Mysticism of the solid earth, let us bring together an ancient and a recent expression of the emotion these purely terrestrial phenomena can arouse. There is one of the Homeric hymns which is addressed to "the Earth, Mother of All." Its beginning and its ending are as follows (in Shelley's translation): "O universal mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee. . . . Mother of gods, thou wife of starry Heaven, Farewell! be thou propitious." Is there not a living continuity between the emotional element in that grand old hymn and the strong full modern sentiment in this concluding stanza of Brown's "Alma Mater"?