With the foregoing reservation, it is, indeed, probable that the Chaldean and Phenician legend of the fruit of the tree of Paradise was nearly akin in spirit to the cycles of ancient myths common to all the branches of the Aryan race. To the study of these M. Adalbert Kuhn has contributed a book of the highest interest.[72] He deals with such as refer to the invention of fire, and to the beverage of life. These are to be found in their most ancient form in the Vedas, and they then passed over, more or less modified by the course of time, to the Greeks, Romans, Slavs, as well as the Iranians and Indians. The fundamental conception of these myths, which are only to be found complete in their oldest forms, is of the universe as an immense tree, whose roots embrace the earth, and whose branches form the vault of heaven.[73] The fruit of this tree is fire--indispensable to human existence, and the material symbol of intelligence; and the leaves distil the Elixir of Life. The gods had reserved to themselves the possession of fire, which sometimes, indeed, descends on earth in the form of lightning, but which men were not themselves to produce. He who--like the Prometheus of the Greeks--discovers the method of artificially kindling a flame, and communicates this discovery to other men, is impious, has stolen the forbidden fruit from the sacred tree, is accursed, and the wrath of the gods pursues him and his race. The analogy between these myths and the Bible narrative is striking indeed. They are, really, one and the same tradition, only bearing a quite different sense, symbolizing an invention of a material order, instead of dwelling on the fundamental fact of the moral order, and disfigured further by the monstrous conception, too frequent in Paganism, of the Divinity as a formidable and adverse power, jealous of the happiness and progress of man. The spirit of error among the Gentiles had distorted the mysterious symbolic memory of the events by which the fate of humanity was decided. The inspired author of Genesis took it up under the form that it had evidently retained among the Hebrews, as among the other nations where it had acquired a material meaning, but he restored to it its true significance, and made it the occasion of a solemn lesson. Some remarks are still needed regarding the animal form assumed by the tempter in Bible story, that serpent who, as figured monuments have shown us, played the same part in the legends of Chaldea and Phenicia.