Arthur Frothingham, one of the founding fathers of Art History, here discusses the origins of Hermes, and suggests that the prototype of Hermes was an Eastern deity of Babylonian extraction; whose character was that of a god of spring; whose function it was to preside over fertilization; whose position was not that of a primal deity, but that of agent and messenger of the Great Mother, in whose domain he brought life to light in the springtime of each year, and so became also associated with the spring sun. The paper is interesting not only for the core premise, but for the connections it shows between Near-Eastern art and iconography and that of ancient Greece.