feel as if we were in the laboratory of nature seeing a wonderful
experiment made; when our ancestors saw the same spectacle they were
sure that a great dragon, breathing fire and roaring with anger, was
ravaging the earth. As children to-day imagine that dolls are alive,
that fairies dance in moonlit meadows on summer nights, or beasts or
Indians make the sounds in the woods, so the people who made the myths
filled the world with creatures unlike themselves, but with something of
human intelligence, feeling and will.

As imaginative children personify the sounds they hear, so the men and
women of an early time personified everything that lived or moved or
gave any sign of life. They filled the earth, air, and sea with
imaginary beings who had power over the elements and affected the lives
of men. There were nymphs in the sea, dryads in the trees, kindly or
destructive spirits in the air, household gods who watched over the
home, and greater gods who managed the affairs of the world. When an
intelligent man finds himself in new surroundings, he begins at once to
study them and try to understand them. In every age this has been one of
the greatest objects of interest to men, and every generation has
endeavoured to explain the world, so as to satisfy not only its
curiosity but its reason. The myths were explanations of the world
created by people who had not had time to study that world closely nor
to train themselves to study it in a scientific way. They saw the world
with their imaginations quite as much as with their eyes, and as they
put persons behind every kind and form of life, they told stories about
the world instead of making accurate and matter-of-fact reports of it.
The change of the seasons is not at all mysterious to us; but to the
Norsemen it was a wonderful struggle between gods and giants. In the
summer the gods had their triumph, but in the winter the giants had
their way. Year after year and century after century this terrible