13 FEBRUARY 1864, Page 20

Tales of Thebes and Argos. By the Rev. G. W.

Cox, M.A. (Long- man and Co.)—The author is already well known by his previous publications as an earnest student of the science of comparative mythology. He is, of course, a disciple of Mr. Max Muller to whom this book is dedicated. The tales themselves, "Medusa," "Dance," " Perseus," and the like, are told in simple and appropriate language, while the whole is preceded by a learned and echolarlike introduction, which contends that all the Aryan mythology was orignally only a poetical expression of the most ordinary occurrences of nature, which afterwards hardened into mythological forms. This theory at once accounts for the strange resemblance between the legends of all the Aryan races which can by no possibility have been copied from each other, and for their apparent immorality. Tho sun destroys the night. The later myth is that Inds, the Bunged, seduced Ahalya, or the night.