the deity himself, until at length that luminary was regarded by the eye of a blind and bewildered faith as the real patron deity, all worthy of adoration, until eventually the fire-worshippers of the world began, as above cited, to multiply holy fires and temples (but never idols or images, or Roman penates, as since introduced) in honour of their deifications, on the tops of mountains. This holy fire principle has not yet ceased its round of temple lights in mid-day darkness in certain sections of our modern globe. Whence torches, or flambeaux, blessed, en role, by the chief officiating priest, and lighted at this alpine feu sacrè, were seen hurrying down the slopes to feed, or replenish, the altaria of the plains, and thence to others as the exigencies of the case demanded. These extraordinary national displays of holy fire, if not indispensable to the unique requirements of solar worship, were, nevertheless made subservient, as calendars, to historical bardic data, to festive amusements, and to degrees of fellowship in the institute. As, from the evidence above cited, the Bel of Brydain, Ierne, Phoenicia, and Syria, seems to have, at a later period, a common identification of attributes in a solar, or heaven-dominant, aspect, let us now endeavour to re-mount the scale of time by a few cycles of Saturn, and find out whether any traces of him can be found among the mighty imperial kingdoms of Central Asia under some other hallowed prerogatives of pagan majesty. This name, then, is, according to late discoveries, found second among the thirteen great gods of Assyria, as they occur in triadic cuneiform characters on the upright tablet of the king, as deciphered at Nimroud under the classification of Saturn, or father of the gods, as wonderfully worked out of chaos by the almost superhuman efforts of a Rich, a Botta, a Layard, and a Rawlinson, to the dismay and confusion of historic cavillers. An inspection of Babylonian monograms cannot be otherwise than extremely interesting and important to the penetrating student of primeval druidical emblems. The Babylonian monogram of Bel bears an analogy in some respects to the druid emblem of Pelydr Goleuni,' which I have humbly endeavoured to work out in another page. The difference, however, between the Asiatic and European characteristics, whether of imperial ciphers, religious symbols, or metaphysical representations, consists merely in a detached, rather than an attached point of contact. The three lines of the latter are separate and distinct, whereas the three points of the former rest severally on a triangular basis. [See plate.] Each of which has been thought to represent the Trinitas in Unitate. In this Babylonian Bel, or Saturn, I discover, sine dubitationis umbra, the Cimbric Hyperborean Sateyrn of our druidical J Saronides. In the course of time he became known as the borrowed 'frigida stella Saturni' of another school. This Cimbric planet, then, was astronomically proved by the Cimmerian Institute to have had, without a compeer, whether in Egypt or Chaldæa, until replaced by an Herschelian Georgium Sidus or Uranus, undisputed sovereign sway in aerial space, and to have maintained his fixed state, or regal stand, within its own self, in in the absence of a belt-discovering telescope, and other appliances of modern science, on the very verge, or point extreme, of their own true, far-sighted, solar system. I am afraid the painted school of skins cannot comprehend the happy, the celestial appropriateness of this Cimbric planetary designation, as being so immeasureably beyond their puny ken, 'in the regions above,' and verging towards the firmament of stars.' 'The two-fold chrystalline heavens,' and the still more distant 'primum mobile,' the 'shechekim,' or 'atmospheric ethers,' of druidical, Ptolemaic, and Hebrew systems of the universe. In addition to the above, other truths may be, and are, evolved. Primarily, that the druids, in a strictly scientific aspect, as well as in a purely mathematical point of view, must have been geometrically cognizant of the cycles of the sun and moon, of twenty-eight and nineteen years respectively. Secondly, that they were not ignorant of the interval of time in which Sateyrn was periodically known and proven to complete an entire circuit of the heavens in reference to the sun; and thereby to embrace a revolution of twenty-nine years and a half, in reference to the manifold requirements of the institute. Let the additional testimony of a Plutarch, so far as it goes, convey the following astronomic piece of information to all New Zealand chiefs of history, and their school;-"That the inhabitants of the Hyperborean island kept every thirtieth year (minus six moons) a solemn festival in honour of Sateyrn, when his star entered into the sign of Taurus." What patience! what zeal for science! what noble, what divine qualifications! what successful observations! what accuracy of detail, there must have been in the Troiau of our prehistoric Saronides! I ask what per-centage of the very learned and inquisitive Hume and Maunder school ever saw Sateyrn? How many of these self-satisfied civilisers, and promoters of modern science as applied to history, can distinguish him from Jupiter, Mars, or any other planet enrolled in the canopy of heaven? Comparisons, I admit, are odious! are they not called for, year after year, by the slanderous aspersions, by the technica memoria repetitions of the parrot order of scribes? The vastness and profundity of druidical metaphysics, the accuracy of their astronomical and other multifarious acquirements, were not ignored, passed over, and insulted by Rome's greatest orator. Go and consult Cicero! inter alios. What causes, then, the difference? the one knew the mental calibre of the lectures given to the multitudo juvenum of Europe by the institute of druids; the other does not know a tittle, except sundry fragmental allusions, mendacious of paint, skins, and roots, in the nursery-tale-formed history of his sapient youth, and the more polished extracts in his manhood from a Macaulay redundant of ante-historical touches of sublime inaccuracies. In addition to the corroborative testimonies of Sanchoniathon, Eusebius, Plutarch, Cicero, and Cæsar, in reference to the profound and learned instruction necessarily received by British and Gaulic youth, I will cite a quotation from Diodorus Siculus, in his own quaint style, respecting the periodical knowledge of sidereal revolutions carried into effect by the scholastic inhabitants of the Hyperborean island-our Ynys Prydain :"The inhabitants believed [on certain data known to him and them] that Apollo [or Bel] descended into their island at the end of every nineteen years [i. e., the cycle of the moon], in which period of time the sun and moon having performed their various revolutions, return to the same point, and begin to repeat the same revolution. This is called by the Greeks the great year, or the cycle of the meton." Again, I cannot allow myself to quit Phoenicia, its gods, and Temple of Orchul, or Orchoul, with his cestus and club cut at a Saronis of the druids, without adverting to a most extraordinary historical event bearing on the stern prehistoric realities of triadic records, that took place in the reign of Ithabel, or Eth Baal, the fifth king of the Sidonians, a priest of Astarte, and father of the queen, wife of Ahab, King of Israel, (in the year 918 or 910 B. C., according to chronological versions.) The second and third clauses of the " triad on awful events' allude to "the trembling of the torrent fire," and to the intensity of the summer drought that proved destructive to animate and inanimate creation. The manifold bearings of the triad in reference to the rainless, dewless, tumps of Ynys Prydain and the far east, were never lost sight of by the bards of all ages. Certain historical allusions have been handed down to us in some of the magnum numerum versuum,' (vel sententiarum) of the druids, which Cæsar unintentionally corroborates, if not as to the nature of their historical contents, at all events as to their antiquity, from generation to generation, from local tradition to local tradition. Sometimes in a form or opus canendi vel scribendi, I am free to admit, of a hitherto unintelligible, if not inexplicable, intactness of identification, unless supported by foreign evidence bearing on the main features of the event, unless they can be made referable to the more salient points of such a catastrophe, in relation to the partial, if not total, extinction in certain cases, of divers tribes of the human family, of beasts of the field and birds of the air, as well as to the unexampled forlorn aspect of the wide domain of nature itself. Let us, then, ascertain whether any events parallel to druid lore are to be found in any of the annals of sacred or profane literature in reference to dewless and rainless phenomena about the age of Homer, and the early kings of Israel, coincident and coexisting with the antiquity of the triad under consideration. B. In the year 1056 before the Christian Era we read in Samuel relative to a corresponding' tumpath diwlith' of prehistoric Prydain, the following remarkable natural similarity of convulsed action in Palestine and neighbouring countries:-"Ye mountains of Gilboa," says the sacred writer, "let there be no dew, neither rain, nor fields of offerings." Again, in the years 918, or 910 3. C., as stated by the author of the "Evidence of Profane History," chapter xiv, I find these words :-"The prophet Elijah was sent by the Lord to Ahab and his idolatrous queen, the daughter of the King of Sidon; and his threats of divine judgment were followed by a drought of three years, during which time neither dew nor rain fell from heaven; and in consequence of it a famine devastated not only the land of Israel, but that of Phoenicia." This fact is substantiated by the Jewish historian, Ant. C., viii. c. 13. The Tyrian annals recorded one or other of these droughts, as we learn from Josephus, who thus quotes the historian Menander: "In the time of Eth-Baal there was an extreme drought, which lasted from the month of Hyperberetœus, till the same month of the following year. Prayers being put up for averting the judgment were followed by mighty claps of thunder," of a character and intensity till then unknown. Again, in 1 Kings, xvii.—“As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I staud, there shall be no more dew nor rain three years but according to my word." Also, in St. James's Epistle, in allusion to some of the above recorded events, it is stated that "It rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months." With the preceding confirmatory extracts let us compare a parallel or analogous result in the distant Indies with the triadic thundering, trembling torrent of fire,' as a never-dying Umbric tradition of the then Imperial Rome: Jam rapidus torrens Sitientes Sirius Indos Hence do we discover, separate and uncollusive, yet, on the main points, not inaptly corresponding evidences of extraordinary phenomena of a peculiarly miraculous order, revealing at unknown epochs, the recollections of each other, so to speak, on perfectly neutral ground of far distant accuracy, wonderment and dismay. In other words, the authenticity of the Hyperborean triads is seen thus amply guaranteed by an inspired chronicler of Israel, by a Jewish historian, by an annalist of Tyre, and, lastly, by the historic effusions of a Roman poet. When doctors, learned in the law, agree, Who shall dispute the soundness of their plea ? But, to revert once more to the text of Taliesin's formula of ceremonial worship. The expression, Llad yn Eurgrawn,' is paraphrased by Dr. Owen Pughe into "Diod mewn aurgyrn, i. e., 'a libation of wine in a golden goblet in the hand,' and prefigures or answers to the Virgilian description of 'Gravem gemmis auroque pateram,' i. e., ' a golden patera, studded with gems': hence, "Quare agite, o juvenes, tantarum in munere laudum 66 Cingite fronde comas, et pocula porgite dextris, With these and similar passages, as well as those referring to the flowers and to the trees of the field, as symbols of a druid creed, compare the Homeric expressious, Εδεξατο χειοι κυπελλον, δεπας αμφικύπελλον, and • Κουροι μεν κρητηρας επεστέψαντο ποτοιο,' and other passages of like import. The next four lines of the Taliesinian formula have been interpreted by the other learned annotator to signify "The hand on the knife and the knife' ar flaenor y praidd,' the 'spem gregis,' or the first-born of the flock or herd." Thus we find the druidical sacrifice here performed corresponding also with another passage from the same author:— "Quatuor hic primum nigrantes terga juvencos Et summas carpens, media inter cornua setas "Ignibus imponit sacris libamina prima, "Voce vocans Hecaten cœloque Ereboque potentem |