But even this assumption, were it conceded to the utmost, would not militate against the doctrine which I have laid down; for Homer’s education was received in Egypt, and India was the medium which illuminated the latter country; nothing, therefore, prevents our yielding to the stream of general authority in ascribing the introduction to the Pelasgi. The word χρονος itself, or “the father of Jove,” was nothing more than an equivalent with the Latin _tempus_; and for the very best possible reason, because the revolutions of this planet, as of the other celestial orbs, came, from their periodical and regular appearances, to be considered the ordinary measurements of the parts of duration or time. It must, no doubt, appear a contradiction that Chronos--the “son of Uranus, and Terra,” as we were told at school, and the first person, as somewhere else stated, who was honoured with a crown--should be called an “orb,” and have “periodical appearances”; and that those appearances should regulate our estimate of days, weeks, years, and seasons. The difficulty, however, will cease, when we consider that though the _sun_, _moon_, and _stars_ were the primary objects of false worship, the deification of dead men, deceased heroes, afterwards crept in, the consequence of which was a mixed kind of idolatry, consisting of _stars_ and _heroes_, or _heroines, deceased_--a planet being assigned to each as the greatest possible honour. “That whom men could not honour in presence, because they dwelt far off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from far, and made an express image of a king, whom they honoured, to the end that by their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent, as if he was present.”[218] Let us now see how the religion of the ancient Irish harmonises with that of the Dabistan, as illustrated in the composition of some of our ancient names. Here _Baal_, or _Moloch_, and _Astarte_ are obviously in the foreground; whilst the popular and vernacular names for those luminaries amongst the peasantry themselves, namely, _Grian_ for the _sun_, _Luan_ for the _moon_, _Righ_ for _king_, and _Rea_ for _queen_, in their appropriation to several localities throughout the country, indicate but too plainly the melancholy tale of their former deification. To instance some few of those names, that strike me as _demonstrative_ of this Sabian worship, I shall begin with