It was most natural and to be expected that primitive man should be most profoundly impressed with the forces of nature, often terrifying and frightful, often winsome and attractive, and that he should bow himself down to the unknown cause of these manifestations. With his extremely finite mind he necessarily personified them; after having done this he proceeded to propitiate them by worship with certain forms of ritual. Perhaps fire first and most of all attracted him in this way, and drew from him the earliest acts of worship, for in spite of the general views to the contrary fire is often of natural origin, and must have been known to men before they became able to produce it by their own efforts. From practical to generalized concepts was a natural step, and thus mythology had its beginnings; the earliest distinctions were as between that which is overhead, i. e. Heaven, and that which is beneath, namely, the earth; these are the beginnings of all cosmogonies. Next the Gods were given the attributes of sex; Heaven was represented as masculine, fructifying, powerful; Earth as conceptive, female and gentle. By the union of these two were produced sun, moon and their progeny--the stars. Later the sun became Poseidon or Neptune, because he appeared from and disappeared into the sea. Then the imagination began to run riot, and gave rise to many individual divinities, gods and goddesses, all with human passions and attributes, mingling and propagating after human fashion, and begetting dynasties and half human races, whose doings were the subject of countless epics, dramas, myths and romances.