between the majesty of the operations of Nature and the
worthlessness of the divinities of Olympus. Her historians,
considering the orderly course of political affairs, the manifest
uniformity in the acts of men, and that there was no event
occurring before their eyes for which they could not find an
obvious cause in some preceding event, began to suspect that the
miracles and celestial interventions, with which the old annals
were filled, were only fictions. They demanded, when the age of
the supernatural had ceased, why oracles had become mute, and why
there were now no more prodigies in the world.

Traditions, descending from immemorial antiquity, and formerly
accepted by pious men as unquestionable truths, had filled the
islands of the Mediterranean and the conterminous countries with
supernatural wonders-- enchantresses, sorcerers, giants, ogres,
harpies, gorgons, centaurs, cyclops. The azure vault was the
floor of heaven; there Zeus, surrounded by the gods with their
wives and mistresses, held his court, engaged in pursuits like
those of men, and not refraining from acts of human passion and
crime.

A sea-coast broken by numerous indentations, an archipelago with
some of the most lovely islands in the world, inspired the Greeks
with a taste for maritime life, for geographical discovery, and
colonization. Their ships wandered all over the Black and
Mediterranean Seas. The time-honored wonders that had been
glorified in the "Odyssey," and sacred in public faith, were
found to have no existence. As a better knowledge of Nature was
obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusion; it was discovered
that there is no Olympus, nothing above but space and stars. With