than one shape (voru eigi einhamir); that they could either take the shapes of animals, as bears or wolves, and so work mischief; or that without undergoing bodily change, an access of rage and strength came over them, and more especially towards night, which made them more than a match for ordinary men." To those who may fancy that in this inquiry I have carried conjecture and apparent analogy beyond the domain of legitimate critical inference, I answer in the words of Professor Gervinus, in his comments on the sonnets of Shakspere--"The caution of the critic does not require that we should repudiate a supposition so extraordinarily probable; it requires alone that we should not obstinately insist upon it and set it up as an established certainty, but that we should lend a willing ear to better and surer knowledge whenever it is offered." Professor Tyndall, too, in his "Lectures on Light," referring to the genesis of all scientific knowledge, says--"All our notions of nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have some foundations in experience. The notion of personal volition in nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions with himself, but vastly transcending him in power. Thus the notion of _causality_--the assumption that natural things did not come of themselves, but had unseen antecedents--lay at the root of even the savage's interpretation of nature. Out of this bias of the human mind to seek for the antecedents of phenomena, all science has sprung."