Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of millions on the shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select my third specimen of a universe-fashioning mythology from a faith, long since extinct, that had its seat on the opposite side of the Old World, along the coasts of the Northern Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, like that of Buddh and of Brahma, _how_ the heavens and earth were formed, and of _what_. Ymir, the great frost-giant, a being mysteriously engendered out of frozen vapor, was slain by the god Odin and his brothers; and, dragging his body into the middle of the universe, they employed the materials of which it was composed in forming the earth. Of his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the lakes and rivers; of his flesh they constructed the land, placing it in the midst of the waters; of his bones they built up the mountains; his teeth and jaws they broke up into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore; of his great skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens; and, tossing his brains into the air, they became the clouds. Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus made, were supported by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its roots anchored deep in the primordial abyss, rose up through the vast central mountains of the world, and, stretching forth its branches to the furthest heaven, bore the stars as its fruit. Encircling the whole earth like a ring, lay the huge snake Midgard,--always hidden in the sea, save when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor; outside the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,--for there lay only blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,--a dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged down the others along with it.