Avienus explains the mild temperature of the Hyperborean country by the temporary proximity of the sun, since, according to the Homeric ideas, it passes during the night by the northern ocean to return to its palace in the east. This ancient tradition was not entirely exploded in the time of Tacitus, who states that on the confines of Germany might be seen the veritable setting of Apollo beyond the water, and he believes that as in the east the sun gives rise to incense and balm by its great proximity to the earth, so in the regions where it sets it makes the most precious of juices to transude from the earth and form amber. It is this idea that is embedded in the fables of amber being the tears of gold that Apollo shed when he went to the Hyperborean land to mourn the loss of his son AEsculapius, or by the sisters of Phaeton, changed into poplars; and it is denoted by the Greek name for amber, _electron_--a sun-stone. The Grecian sages, long before the time of Tacitus, said that this very precious material was an exhalation from the earth that was produced and hardened by the rays of the sun, which they thought came nearer to the earth in the west and in the north. Florus, in relating the expedition of Decimus Brutus along the coast of Spain, gives great effect to the Epicurean views about the sun, by declaring that Brutus only stopped his conquests after having witnessed the actual descent of the sun into the ocean, and having heard with horror the terrible noise occasioned by its extinction. The ancients also believed that the sun and the other heavenly bodies were nourished by the waters--partly the fresh water of the rivers, and partly the salt water of the sea. Cleanthes gave the reason for the sun returning towards the equator on reaching the solstices, that it could not go too far away from the source of its nourishment. Pytheas relates that in the Island of Thule, six days' journey north of Great Britain, and in all that neighbourhood, there was no land nor sea nor air, but a compound of all three, on which the earth and the sea were suspended, and which served to unite together all the parts of the universe, though it was not possible to go into these places, neither on foot nor in ships. Perhaps the ice floating in the frozen seas and the hazy northern atmosphere had been seen by some navigator, and thus gave rise to this idea. As it stands, the history may be perhaps matched by that of the amusing monk who said he had been to the end of the world and had to stoop down, as there was not room to stand between heaven and earth at their junction.