which nothing can escape, and the irresistible grasp of his talons. All this with us is mere poetry, but all early language is poetry. There is nothing more certainly established by the science of language than "the fact that all words expressive of immaterial conceptions are derived by metaphor from words expressive of sensible ideas." But besides such metaphors as those of which I have just been speaking, and which are intelligible even when translated, there are others which are necessarily peculiar to the language in which they originated. The names of Seb and of Tehuti, as we have seen, were to the Egyptians connected with the names of the goose and the ibis. Anpu (Anubis) "is apparently," as Mr. Goodwin says, "the ancient Egyptian name for a jackal." Sebek, one of the names of the Sun-god, is also the name of a kind of crocodile. It is not improbable that the cat, in Egyptian mäu, became the symbol of the Sun-god, or Day, because the word mäu also means light. It is, I think, quite easy to see how the mythological symbolism arose through these varieties of metaphorical language. And this metaphorical language reacted upon thought, and, as in other religions, obtained the mastery.
The triumph of the symbol over the thought is most sensibly visible in the development of the worship of the Apis Bull. This worship is indeed as old as the age of the Pyramids, but an inspection of the tombs of the bulls in the Serapeum discovered by M. Mariette under
