This is also perhaps the proper place to observe that just as the great god Baal has been resolved by modern scholarship {269}into many local Baalim, and just as the great god Adonis has been reduced by recent research in each case to some particular Adon or lord out of many, so each such separate deity, artificially manufactured, though called by the common name of the Prah or the Tiber,’ yet retains to the last some distinct identity. In fact, the great gods appear to be rather classes than individuals. That there were many Nymphs and many Fauni, many Silvani and many Martes, has long been known; it is beginning to be clear that there were also many Saturns, many Jupiters, many Junones, many Vestæ. Even in Greece it is more than probable that the generalised names of the great gods were given in later ages to various old sacred stones and holy sites of diverse origin: the real object of worship was in each case the spontaneous or artificial god; the name was but a general title applied in common, perhaps adjectivally, to several such separate deities. In the Roman pantheon, this principle is now, quite well established; in the Semitic it is probable; in most others, the progress of modern research is gradually leading up to it. Even the elemental gods themselves do not seem in their first origin to be really singular; they grow, apparently, from generalised phrases, like our “Heaven” and “Providence,” applied at first to the particular deity of whom at the moment the speaker is thinking. The Zeus or Jupiter varies with the locality. Thus, when the Latin prætor, at the outbreak of the Latin war, defied the Roman Jupiter, we may be sure it was the actual god there visible before him at whom he hurled his sacrilegious challenge, not the ideal deity in the sky above his head. Indeed, we now know that each village and each farm had a Jovis of its own, regarded as essentially a god of wine, and specially worshipped at the wine-feast in April, when the first cask was broached. This individuality of the gods is an important point to bear in mind; for the tendency of language is always to treat many similar deities as practically identical, especially in late {270}and etherealised forms of religion. And mythologists have made the most of this syncretic tendency.