To the modern mind, which claims to have deciphered Nature’s scattered hieroglyphs, and finds a genealogical document even in the evanescent wrinkles on a baby’s foot, the idea of man taking origin from a tree will seem in the highest degree fantastic, but to the primitive intelligence it probably presented no greater difficulty than the extraction of the new baby from the parsley bed does to the modern child. The early inquirer may well have found in it the most natural answer to the eternal riddle, “Whence came our first parents?” the most plausible solution to the strange problem of man’s separate existence upon the globe, supplying the necessary link between him and the great mother-earth, which supported and fed him while alive, and received him again into her bosom when dead. Speculation apart, however, the solution would appear to have commended itself to many different inquirers, for the belief that the human race took its first origin from trees is met with in the mythology of the most widely separated races. Thus we read in the Eddas that when heaven and earth had been made, Odin and his brothers walking by the sea-shore came upon two trees. These they changed into human beings, male and female. The first brother gave them soul and life; the second endowed them with wit and will to move; the third added face, speech, sight, and hearing. They clothed them also and chose their names, Ask for the man’s and Embla for the woman’s. And then they sent them forth to be the parents of the human race.[153] Again, according to the Iranian account of the creation the first human couple, Maschia and Maschiâna, issued from the ground in the form of a rhubarb plant (the _Rheum ribes_), which was at first single, but in process of time became divided into two.[154] Ormuzd imparted to each a human soul, and they became the parents of mankind. In the corresponding legend current amongst the Sioux of the Upper Missouri[155] one seems to catch an echo from the Garden of Eden. Here the original parents, like the trees from which they developed, at first stood firmly fixed to the earth, until a monster snake gnawed away the roots and gave them independent motion, just as in Paradise the serpent destroyed the harmony and mutual trust which united Adam and Eve. The classical nations possessed a similar tradition. According to Hesychius it was believed by the Greeks that the human race was the fruit of the ash, and Hesiod relates that it was from the trunks of ash-trees that Zeus created the third or bronze race of men.[156] The oak was particularised as the favoured tree in another tradition. “Whence art thou?” inquires Penelope of the disguised Ulysses, “for thou are not sprung of oak or rock, as old tales tell.”[157] Virgil, too, speaks of Nymphs, and fauns, and savage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak.[158]