The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was well-nigh universal. Everywhere we find accounts of a distant past when the gods walked on earth. Egyptians, Hindoos, Greeks, Japanese, Polynesians, Hebrews and American Indians had tales of the origin of things to tell. This desire to account for {31} origins is not hard to understand. The same psychological tendency is at work to-day and gives zest to the theory of evolution. Why did the _Descent of Man_ awaken such a storm throughout the Western World if not because it shook the story of man's first coming, which had been handed down from generation to generation since the mists of antiquity? Man wants to know about himself, how he came here, and whither he is going. The vogue of the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful and longer lived. _All agency was for him personal agency_. And there are, even now, a surprisingly large number of people who can think in no other terms. The universe is for them the playground of spirits who work their will upon it. Matter and energy and the slow growth of years are ideas which strike them cold. Their view of the universe is dramatic and even melodramatic; it is personal, mythical. Let us glance at some of these attempts to account for the world. We shall not find them very coherent or deep, but we shall always find them instructive for the light they throw upon man, himself, and the limits set to his theories about origins by the concrete agency to which he perforce appealed. We shall then realize how natural were the questions which man asked and which he sought to answer, and how impossible it was for him to offer any other solutions than those imaginative ones which grew up in folk-lore and which have been developed and re-cast in the various religions.