Still more remarkable is the fact that beneath the superstructure of Christian rites to be used when the herbs were being picked or administered we find traces not merely of the ancient heathen religion, but of a religion older than that of Woden. It has been emphasised by our most eminent authorities that in very early times our ancestors had but few chief gods, and it is a remarkable fact that there is no mention whatever of Woden in the whole range of Saxon literature before the time of Alfred. In those earlier centuries they seem to have worshipped a personification of Heaven, and Earth, the wife of Heaven, and the Son, whom after ages called Thor. There were also Nature deities, Hrede, the personification of the brightness of Summer, and Eostra, the radiant creature of the Dawn. It will be remembered that it was the worship, not of Balder, but of Eostra, which the Christian missionaries found so deeply imbedded that they adopted her name and transferred it to Easter. For this we have the authority of Bede. Separate from these beneficent powers were the destroying and harmful powers of Nature--darkness, storm, frost and the deadly vapours of moorland and fen, personified in the giants, the ogres, the furious witches that rode the winds and waves; in fact, the whole horde of demons of sea and land and sky. It is the traces of these most ancient forms of religion which give to the manuscripts their strongest fascination. Many of us miss all that is most worth learning in old books through regarding anything in them that is unfamiliar as merely quaint, if not ridiculous. This attitude seals a book as effectually and as permanently as it seals a sensitive human being. There is only one way of understanding these old writers, and that is to forget ourselves entirely and to try to look at the world of nature as they did. It is not "much learning" that is required, but sympathy and imagination. In the case of these Saxon manuscripts we are repaid a thousandfold; for they transport us to an age far older than our own, and yet in some ways so young that we have lost its magic key. For we learn not only of herbs and the endless uses our forefathers made of them, but, if we try to read them with understanding, these books open for us a magic casement through which we look upon the past bathed in a glamour of romance. Our Saxon ancestors may have been a rude and hardy race, but they did not live in an age of materialism as we do. In their writings on herbs and their uses we see "as through a glass darkly" a time when grown men believed in elves and goblins as naturally as they believed in trees, an age when it was the belief of everyday folk that the air was peopled with unseen powers of evil against whose machinations definite remedies must be applied. They believed, as indeed the people of all ancient civilisations have believed, that natural forces and natural objects were endued with mysterious powers whom it was