“Where is the way to the dwelling of light; and as for darkness, where is the place thereof? “Doubtless thou knowest, for thou wast then born. And the number of thy days is great.” (Job xxxviii. 12, 18, 19, 21). This is dawn in biblical language and in nature; but who would recognise it under the figure of Daphne, Eos, or Ahana? All of whom have so exercised the brains of our mythologists. But Jehovah drives still more deeply the point of His discourse into the conscience of Job. “Who hath cleft a channel for the water flood, to cause it to rain on a land where no man is? “Hath the rain a father? “Or who hath begotten the drops of dew? “Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?” (Job xxxviii. 25, 26, 28, 34). The Aryans had also described the rain, and their thoughts on the subject coincided with those of the Semitic race, but they were clothed in the grotesque language generally associated with myths. “The rain is represented in all the primitive mythologies of the Aryan race as the fruit of the embraces of Heaven and Earth.”[120] This is an advance towards the poetical metaphor which Æschylus at a later date thus expressed: “The bright sky loves to fructify the earth; the earth on her part aspires to the heavenly marriage. Rain falling from the loving sky impregnates the earth, and she produces for mortals her fruit.” It is necessary to possess a somewhat profound knowledge of the morphological characteristics of the Semitic and Aryan languages in order to note accurately the particulars to which I have drawn attention, and to understand the amount of influence they exercise on religious phraseology. THE GENIUS OF LANGUAGES Each linguistic family has special features, just as each race has its own physiognomy; the distinctive feature of the Semitic languages is that the significative elements destined to form appellatives, when once incorporated as roots in the body of a word, suffered no modification, and the original meaning could never be ignored. Thus all Semitic names for the dawn, the sun, the vault of heaven, the rain, and other natural phenomena, preserving their appellative character, could not be used for any other object; thus they could never express an abstract idea, such as that of the Deity. The method followed with regard to the arrangement of words in the greater number of Semitic dictionaries, which are generally arranged according to their roots, attest the truth of this fact. When we wish to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic, we first seek for its root, and then look in the dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In similar languages no ambiguity is possible; nothing lends itself to myths.