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It is very curious and interesting to know that the first stage, the stage of worship, is practically missing in the Chinese annals; the very earliest Chinese observations show us the Chinese, a thoroughly practical people, trying to get as much out of the stars as they could for their terrestrial purposes.

In Babylonia it is a very remarkable thing that from the beginning of things—so far as we can judge from the records—the sign for God was a star.

We find the same idea in Egypt: in some of the hieroglyphic texts three stars represented the plural "gods."

I have already remarked that the ideas of the early Indian civilisation, crystallised in their sacred books called Vedas, were known to us long before either the Egyptian or the Babylonian and Assyrian records had been deciphered.

Enough, however, is now known to show that we may take the Vedas to bring before us the remnants of the first ideas which dawned upon the minds of the earliest dwellers in Western Asia—that is, the territory comprised between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, the Indus, and the waters which bound the southern coasts—say, as far as Cape Comorin. Of these populations, the Egyptians and Babylonians may be reckoned as the first. According to Lenormant—and he is followed by all the best scholars—this region was invaded in the earliest times by peoples coming from the steppes of Northern Asia. Bit by bit they spread to the west and east. There are strange variants in the ideas of the Chaldæans already recovered from the inscriptions and those preserved in the Vedas. Nevertheless, we find a sun-god[2] and the following hymn:—