discover in this old cosmogonic myth a dim hint of the nebular
hypothesis of creation, as it is called? Certainly, Niflheim, the
Mistland, and Muspellheim, the Flameland, commingled together, would
produce that hot, seething, nebulous fire-mist, out of which, the
physicists say, was evolved, by agglomeration and centrifugal and
centripetal attraction, our fair, harmonious system of worlds bounded
by outermost Neptune, thus far the Ultima Thule of the solar system.
Perhaps Asgard, translated from mythic into scientific language, means
the Zodiacal Light, and the Bridge Bifröst, the Milky Way.

How curious, to trace in the grotesque mythic cosmogonies of India,
Greece, and Scandinavia, modern geology, botany, chemistry, etc.,--the
vast and brutal giants of the Eddas and other old mythic scriptures
being recognized as impersonations of the forces of Nature! The old
mythic cosmogonists and the modern geologists and astronomers do not
differ amongst themselves so much, after all. The mythic physicists had
personal agents at work, in place of our simple elemental ones; the
result is the same. Take the mythic cosmogonies of ancient Greece,
Scandinavia, and India, and the geologies and astronomies of the
present day, and compare their pages, changing things personal into
things impersonal. The expulsion and banishment of the old shapeless
mundane deities by a new and more beautiful race of gods, the cosmical
divinities, the powers and rulers of an ordered world, are intelligible
enough when translated into our modern geological nomenclature. The
leaves of the Stone Book, as the rocky layers of the earth have been
called, and the blue hieroglyphic page of heaven, also, are more
intelligibly read by the aid of the mythic glosses of old religion, of
Saga, Rune, and Voluspa. They spell the telluric records aright in
their own peculiar language. The assaults of the Typhons and Jötuns
upon the celestial dynasty, and their attempts to scale the fiery