The travels of Hercules, it must be confessed, as traditionally recorded, are somewhat eccentric. But are they explicable on any solar theory? He begins by travelling from _west_ to east; he then proceeds _south_, and although he traverses Africa westward, he diverges abruptly to the _north_, from which he proceeds south, and ends as he began by travelling from _west_ to east. All this, however, is perfectly explicable if we are prepared to admit Bryant's ("Mythology," ii. 70) historical surmises, and to go along with him so far as to believe that the tradition was mainly preserved through Cuthite or _Chus_ite channels. We can, then, see a probability in the conjecture that the descendants of Chus, in preserving the tradition of the travels of Hercules (Herakles), superadded or substituted the scenes and incidents of their own wanderings, after they had settled down in the place of their final location. CHAPTER IX. _ASSYRIAN MYTHOLOGY._ "But surely there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that in the poems of Homer such vestiges may be found. Every recorded form of society bears some traces of those by which it has been preceded, and in that highly primitive form, which Homer has been the instrument of embalming for all posterity, the law of general reason obliges us to search for elements and vestiges more primitive still.... The general proposition that we may expect to find the relics of scriptural traditions in the heroic age of Greece, though it leads, if proved, to important practical results, is independent even of a belief in those traditions, as they stand in the scheme of revealed truth. They must be admitted to have been facts on earth, even by those who would deny them to have been facts of heavenly origin, in the shape in which Christendom receives them; and the question immediately before us is one of pure historical probability. The descent of mankind from a single pair, the lapse of that pair from original righteousness, are apart from and ulterior to it. We have traced the Greek nation to a source, and along a path of migration which must in all likelihood have placed its ancestry, at some point or points, in close local relations with the scenes of the earliest Mosaic records: the retentiveness of that people equalled its receptiveness, and its close and fond association with the past, made it prone indeed to incorporate novel matter into its religion, but prone also to keep it there after its incorporation.