there arose a dispute between them; the woman ran away, and the man
ran after her, until they came to the end of the earth where land and
sky met. The woman jumped into the sky, and the man after her, where
they kept chasing each other forever, as Sun and Moon. Now and then
they came close enough to snap at each other. That was their
explanation of an eclipse. (Childhood of the World.--Edward Clodd.)
With this mythus, the primitive man was satisfied, until his
developing intelligence realized its inadequacy. Science was born of
that realization.

During the middle ages it was believed by Europeans that in certain
parts of the world, in India, for instance, there were people who had
only one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and were more like
monsters than humans. This was imaginary knowledge, which travel and
research have corrected. The myth of a one-eyed people living in India
has been replaced by accurate information concerning the Hindoos.
Likewise, before the science of ancient languages was perfected--before
archaeology had dug up buried cities and deciphered the hieroglyphics
on the monuments of antiquity, most of our knowledge concerning the
earlier ages was mythical, that is to say, it was knowledge not based
on investigation, but made to order. Just as the theologians still
speculate about the other world, primitive man speculated about this
world. Even we moderns, not very long ago, believed, for instance, that
the land of Egypt was visited by ten fantastic plagues; that in one
bloody night every first born in the land was slain; that the angel of
a tribal-god dipped his hand in blood and printed a red mark upon the
doors of the houses of the Jews to protect them from harm; that Pharaoh
and his armies were drowned in the Red Sea; that the children of Israel
wandered for forty years around Mount Sinai; and so forth, and so forth.
But now that we can read the inscriptions on the stone pages dug out of