Baron John Francis Arundell Arundell of Wardour

[1] It has curiously happened that I have never seen the work which, after Bryant, would probably have afforded the largest repertory of facts—G. Stanley Faber’s “Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri;” and it is only recently, since these pages were in print, that I have become acquainted with Davies’ “Celtic Researches” and “The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids.” The Celtic traditions respecting their god Hu, are so important from more than one point of view, that I cannot forbear making the following extracts from the latter author, which I trust the reader will refer back to and compare in chap. ix. with the Babylonian Hoa, at p. 66 with the Chinese Yu, and at p. 262 with the African Hu.

Davies’ “Celtic Researches,” p. 184, says, “Though Hu Gadarn primarily denoted the Supreme Being [compare chap. ix.], I think his actions have a secondary reference to the history of Noah. The following particulars are told of him in the above-cited selection:—(1.) His branching or elevated oxen [compare p. 205 and chap. xi.] ... at the Deluge, drew the destroyer out of the water, so that the lake burst forth no more [compare chap. iv.] (2.) He instructed the primitive race in the cultivation of the earth [compare p. 239]. (3.) He first collected and disposed them into various tribes [compare p. 239]. (4.) He first gave laws, traditions, &c., and adapted verse to memorials [compare p. 239]. (5.) He first brought the Cymry into Britain and Gaul [compare p. 66], because he would not have them possess lands by war and contention, but of right and peace” [compare chaps. xiii. and xv.] It is true that these traditions come to us in ballads attributed to Welsh bards of the 13th and 14th centuries A.D.; but, as the Rev. Mr Davies said, “that such a superstition should have been fabricated by the bards in the middle ages of Christianity, is a supposition utterly irreconcileable with probability.” And I think the improbability will be widely extended if the readers will take the trouble, after perusal, to make the references as above.

[2] I have appended a short biographical notice of Colonel G. Macdonell, which I venture to think may contain matter of public interest.

[3] Sir H. Lytton Bulwer, in his “Life of Lord Palmerston,” says, i. p. 62, “There has seldom happened in this country so sudden and unexpected a change of Ministers as that which took place in March 1807.”

[4] W. James, “Military Occurrences of Late War,” i. 56, says, 1450 regular troops; Murray, “History of British America,” i. 189, says, 2100 troops.

[5] The following corrections have been supplied to me by the Hon. L. D.:—“Lieut.-Colonel George Macdonell was born on the 12th August 1780, at St Johns, Newfoundland, where his father, Captain Macdonell, was stationed. He was the second son of Captain Macdonell (who had been one of the body-guard of Prince Charles), by his wife, Miss Leslie of Fetternear, Aberdeenshire. George was rated on the navy by the Admiral of the station, who was a personal friend of Captain Macdonell, and his name accordingly remained on the list for years, but he never joined. I believe he entered in 1795 the regiment raised by Lord Darlington, and afterwards served with the Duke of York in the war in Holland. He was, I know, at one time in the 8th infantry, for I remember Sir Greathed Harris saying that he was always a well-remembered and honoured officer in that regiment. He ultimately had the post of Inspecting Field-Officer in Canada.”

[6] Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1871; article, “Mr Darwin on Conscience.”

[7] This article, and perhaps four or five others on miscellaneous subjects, written within a few weeks of the above date, were my only contributions to the Tablet, at that time owned and edited by my friend Mr J. E. Wallis, who, during some ten or twelve eventful years, continued to uphold the standard of Tradition, with singular ability and at great personal sacrifice.

[8] “All that Bentham wrote on this subject (“International Law”) is comprised within a comparatively small compass (Works, vol. ii. 535–560, iii. 200–611, ix. 58–382). But it would be unpardonable to omit all mention of a science which he was the means of revolutionising, and which, previously to his taking it in hand, had not even received a proper distinctive name.”—John Hill Burton, “Benthamiana,” p. 396. From Bentham’s point of view, “International Law” is the proper distinctive name.

[9] Montalembert, Correspondant, Aout, 1861.

[10] C’est une des plus admirables choses de ce monde que jamais nul empire, et nul succÈs n’ont pu s’assujetir l’histoire et en imposer par elle À la posteritÉ. Des generations de rois issus du mÊme sang se sont succÉdÉ pendant dix siÈcles au gouvernement du mÊme peuple, et malgrÉ cette perpetuitÉ d’intÉrÊt et de commandement, ils n’ont pu couvrir aux yeux du monde les fautes de leurs pÈres et maintenir sur leur tombe le faux Éclat de leur vie.—Lacordaire: vid. Correspondant, Nov. 1856.

[11] Vide “Sentiment de Napoleon I. sur Le Christianisme,” d’apres des temoignages recueillis par feu le Chevalier de Beauterne. Nouvelle edition, par M. ——; Bray, Paris, 1860.

[12] Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. Pall Mall Gazette, May 4, 1871.

[13] “Utiles esse autem opiniones has quis neget, quum intelligat quam multa firmentur jure jurando, quantÆ salutis sint foederum religiones? quam multos divini supplicii metus a scelere revocaverit? quamque sancta sit societas civium inter ipsos diis immortalibus interpositis tum judicibus tum testibus?”—Cicero, De Legibus, ii. 7.

[14] “From utility, then, we may denominate a principle that may serve to preside over and govern, as it were, such arrangements as shall be made of the several institutions, or combinations of institutions, that compose the matter of this science.” Bentham’s “Fragment on Government,” xliii., and at p. 45, the principle of utility is declared “all-sufficient,” ... that “principle which furnishes us with that reason, which alone depends not upon any higher reason, but which is itself the sole and all-sufficient reason for every point of practice whatsoever.”

[15] Bentham speaks of his enunciation of “the greatest happiness principle” in the following terms:—“Throughout the whole horizon of morals and of politics, the consequences were glorious and vast. It might be said without danger of exaggeration, that they who sat in darkness had seen a great light.” With reference to this Lord Macaulay says, “We blamed the utilitarians for claiming the credit of a discovery, when they had merely stolen that morality (the morality of the gospel) and spoiled it in the stealing. They have taken the precept of Christ and left the motive, and they demand the praise of a most wonderful and beneficial invention, when all they have done has been to make a most useful maxim useless by separating it from its sanction. On religious principles it is true that every individual will best promote his own happiness by promoting the happiness of others. But if religious considerations be left out of the question it is not true. If we do not reason on the supposition of a future state, where is the motive? If we do reason on that supposition, where is the discovery?”—Vide Lord Macaulay’s Essays on “Westminster Reviewer’s Defence of Mill,” and “The Utilitarian Theory of Government” in Lord Macaulay’s “Miscellaneous Writings.”

[16] There was a way in which the argument was formerly stated by utilitarians which was much more plausible, but which I observe is now seldom if ever resorted to by the modern exponents of this theory. The Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1871, says: “The now prevailing doctrine” that there is no absolute standard of right and wrong, but “that the right and wrong of an action or a motive depend upon the influence of the action, or the motive upon the general good.” The argument to which I refer is thus stated by Mr W. O. Manning in his “Commentaries on the Law of Nations,” 1839:—“Everything around us proves that God designed the happiness of His creatures. It is the will of God that man should be happy. To ascertain the will of God regarding any action, we have, therefore, to consider the tendency of that action to promote or diminish human happiness,” p. 59. It is perfectly true that man was created by God for happiness, and that ultimate happiness, if he does not forfeit it, is the end to which he is still destined. It is moreover true that even in this world he may enjoy a conditional and comparative happiness. How it is that this happiness cannot be complete and perfect here below is precisely the secret which tradition reveals to him. It is important, from the point of view of happiness, both for individuals and nations, that the truth of this revelation should be ascertained, and that the conditions and limitations within which happiness is possible should be known, otherwise life will be consumed in chimerical pursuits of the unattainable, and in the case of nations will be certain to end, at some time or another, in catastrophes such as we have recently witnessed in Paris. In an enlarged sense it is therefore true to say that the divine will has regard to utility; but the view has this implied condition, that what we regard as utility should in the first place be conformable to what is directly or indirectly known to be the divine precept and command; and, on the other hand, if no advertence is made to revelation or the tradition of the human race, what is called utility, however large and disinterested the speculation may be, it can never be more than the view of an individual or of a section of mankind, which it is highly probable that other individuals and sections of mankind, looking at the same facts, from a different point of view, will see reason to contradict.

[17] If “the magnificent principle” is thus stated, “mankind ought to pursue their greatest happiness,” it must be borne in mind that there are persons whose interests are opposed to the greatest happiness of mankind. Lord Macaulay’s opponent replies, “ought is not predicable of such persons; for the word ought has no meaning unless it be used in reference to some interest.” Lord Macaulay replied, “that interest was synonymous with greatest happiness; and that, therefore, IF the word ought has no meaning unless used with reference to interest, then, to say that mankind ought to pursue their greatest happiness, is simply to say that the greatest happiness is the greatest happiness; that every individual pursues his own happiness; that either what he thinks his happiness must coincide with the greatest happiness of society or not; that if what he thinks his happiness coincides with the greatest happiness of society, he will attempt to promote the greatest happiness of society whether he ever heard of the “greatest happiness principle” or not; and that, by the admission of the Westminster Reviewer, IF his happiness is inconsistent with the greatest happiness of society, there is no reason why he should promote the greatest happiness of society. Now, that there are individuals who think that for their happiness which is not for the greatest happiness of society, is evident.... The question is not whether men have some motives for promoting the greatest happiness, but whether the stronger motives be those which impel them to promote the greatest happiness.“—Lord Macaulay’s “Miscellaneous Writings,” Utilitarian Theory of Government, pp. 177–9.

[18] It will be seen, later on, in what this view differs from Sir Henry Maine’s.

[19] In all the Diluvian commemorative festivals, to which I shall draw attention (ch. xi.), there is one day set apart for the commemoration of this primitive equality, accompanied with Bacchanalian festivities and ceremonials.

[20] Sir H. Maine (“Ancient Law,” p. 95) says, “Like all other deductions from the hypothesis of a law natural, and like the belief itself in a law of nature, it was languidly assented to, until it passed out of the possession of the lawyers into that of the literary men of the eighteenth century, and the public which sat at their feet. With them it became the most distinct tenet of their creed, and was even regarded as the summary of all the others.”

[21] “The earlier advocates of the doctrine of the social compact maintained it on the ground of its actual existence. They asserted that this account of the origin of political societies was historically true. Thus Locke, &c.”—Sir G. C. Lewis, “Meth. of Reasoning in Pol.” i. p. 429.

[22] “The only reliable materials which we possess, besides the Pentateuch, for the history of the period which it embraces, consist of some fragments of Berosus and Manetho, an epitome of the early Egyptian history of the latter, a certain number of Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions, and two or three valuable papyri.”—Rawlinson, Bampton Lectures. Oxford, 1859, ii. 55.

[23] I indicated this view in a pamphlet, “Inviolability of Property by the State, by an English Landlord.” 1866.

[24] Again Esau and Jacob separated, after the death of the patriarch Isaac, because their stock in herds and flocks had so increased that, according to the scriptural phrase, “it was more than they might dwell together,” and further, “the land would not bear them because of their cattle.”—Gen. chap, xxxvi.; Vide “Pinkerton, Voy.” i. 528.

Writing with reference to the Hamitic dynasty, founded at Babylon by Nimrod (vide Rawlinson, Anc. Mon.), and the conquests of Kudur-Lagamer, identified by Rawlinson as Chedor-Laomer, Mr Brace adds (“Ethnology,” p. 28):—“This at a period, as Professor Rawlinson remarks, when the kings of Egypt had never ventured beyond their borders, and when no monarch in Asia held dominion over more than a few petty tribes and a few hundred miles of territory.”—Vide ch. xiii. “A Golden Age.”

[25] Such seems, at a comparatively recent period (1762), to have been the state of things at a widely different point among the Samoides:—“The real spot where the habitations of the Samoides begin,—if any case be pointed out among a people which is continually changing residence,—is in the district of Mozine, beyond the river of that name, three or four hundred wersts from Archangel. The colony, which is actually met with there, and which lives dispersed according to the usage of those people, each family by itself, without forming villages and communities, does not consist of more than three hundred families, or thereabouts, which are all descended from two different tribes, the one called Laghe and the other Wanonte—distinctions carefully regarded by them.”—Vide “Pinkerton, Voy.” i. 524. It is also said (p. 582) of certain moral observances amongst them (vide infra, p. 155):—“All these customs, religiously observed among them, are no other than the fruits of tradition, handed down to them from their ancestors; and this tradition, with some reason, may be looked upon as law.” It is a common idea amongst us that the word home is a peculiarly English word, and, I confess, it was my own impression, but I am set musing by finding among these same Samoides the word “chome” as their word for their tents, to which they cling so closely.—Vide Pinkerton, i. 63.

“I visited four other villages or goungs, and there may be as many more in Assam, each containing about three or four hundred people. Every community is under the patriarchal government of a chief, from whom the village takes its name.... The chiefs of villages would combine against a common enemy, but are as independent of each other as the old Highland heads of clans.... I was curiously reminded of the clan distinctions, by observing that the home-grown cotton cloths differed in pattern in the different villages. In all cases chequered patterns were worn, presenting as various combinations of colours and stripes as our own tartans, and each village possessed a pattern peculiar to itself, generally, though not universally, affected by the inhabitants.”—Travels in Northern Assam, Field, i., 1870; vide also Hunter’s “Rural Bengal,” 1868, p. 217.

[26] “Hunter’s Memoir of his Captivity (from childhood to the age of nineteen) among the Indians,” p. 180, 181. He also adds (p. 307):—“The Indians do not pretend to any correct knowledge of the tumuli or mounds that are occasionally met with in their country.... One tradition of the Quapaws states that a nation differing very much from themselves inhabited the country many hundred snows ago, when game was so plenty that it required only slight efforts to procure subsistence, and when there existed no hostile neighbours to render the pursuit of war necessary.” And Stephen’s “Central America” (i. 142) notices the absence of all weapons of war from the representations in sculpture at Copan, and says:—“In other countries, battle scenes, warriors, and weapons of war, are among the most prominent subjects of sculpture; and from the entire absence of them here, there is reason to believe that the people were not warlike, but peaceable, and easily subdued.”

[27] III., ch. xxxvii. Leges, 337.

[28] I find incidental corroboration of this view in “The ArchÆology of Prehistoric Annals” of Scotland, by Dr Wilson—“The infancy of all written history is necessarily involved in fable. Long ere scattered families had conjoined their patriarchal unions into tribes, and clans acknowledging some common chief, and submitting their differences to the rude legislation of the arch-priest or civil head of the commonwealth, treacherous tradition has converted the story of their birth into the wildest admixture of myth and legendary fable.”—Introd., p. 12.

Even in the plain of Sennaar (Shinar) we see something of this fusion of tribes—“Besides these two main constituents of the ChaldÆan race there is reason to believe that both a Semitic and Aryan element existed.... The subjects of the early kings are continually designated in the inscriptions by the title of ‘Kiprat-arbat,’ which is interpreted to mean ‘the four nations’ or ‘tongues’” (Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies,” i. p. 69). Professor Rawlinson is also of opinion, that “the league of the four kings in Abraham’s time seems correspondent to a four-fold ethnic division.”

Does not the above also correspond to the four-fold ethnic division of the Vedas?—Vide infra, p. 39. Compare also the four-fold division of the world or of Peru, according to various Indian traditions, between Manco Capac and his brothers.—Vide Hakluyt Society’s edition of Garcilasso de la Vega, i. 71–75. If these are not traditions of fusions of races, they can only be diluvian traditions of the four couples who came out of the ark, which was the conjecture of the Spaniards in the case of Manco Capac.

[29] This view will be found in the first chapter of Mr J. S. Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” ch. i. p. 6. “There is perhaps no people or community now existing which subsist entirely on the spontaneous produce of vegetation.” [Whether mankind ever lived “entirely on,” &c., may be questioned, but it is implied in Gen. ix. 3 that man did not subsist on animal food until after the Deluge, a fact which lies at the foundation of Porphyry’s work, “De Abstinentia.”] “But many tribes still live exclusively, or almost exclusively, on wild animals, the produce of hunting or fishing.... The first great advance beyond this state consists in the domestication of the more useful animals: giving rise to the the pastoral or nomad state.... From this state of society to the agricultural, the transition is not indeed easy (for no great change in the habits of mankind is otherwise than difficult, and in general either painful or very slow), but it lies in what may be called the spontaneous course of events.”

[30] Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America,” vol. i. p. 113.

[31] Vide Sir S. Baker; vide note, ch. xiii., Noah.

[32] The following passage, inter alia, from Herodotus seems to sustain this—“To the eastward of those Scythians, who apply themselves to the culture of the land, and on the other side of the river Panticapes, the country is inhabited by Scythians who neither plough nor sow, but are employed in keeping cattle.”—Herod., iv., Mel.

[33] These legends, shown to be aboriginal, are very curious. They are, however, too long to be extracted here. They would repay perusal.

[34] Mr Max MÜller also says (“Chips,” ii. p. 41)—“It should be observed that most of the terms connected with the chase and warfare differ in each of the Aryan dialects, while words connected with more peaceful occupations belong, generally, to the common heirloom of the Aryan language,” which proves “that all the Aryan nations had led a long life of peace before they separated, and that their language acquired individuality and nationality, as each colony started in search of new homes,—new generations forming new terms connected with the warlike and adventurous life of their onward migrations. Hence it is that not only Greek and Latin, but all Aryan languages have their peaceful words in common.” Also vide p. 28, 29.

[35] I find this conjecture confirmed in the pages of the most recent authority on the subject, Mr Brace, “Ethnology,” p. 13, 14—“On the continent of Asia the Turanians were probably the first who figured as nations in the ante-historical period. Their emigrations began long before the wanderings of the Aryans and Semites, who, wherever they went, always discovered a previous population, apparently of Turanian origin, which they either expelled or subdued.” According to Max MÜller’s hypothesis there were two migrations, one northern and one southern [corresponding to the migration as above], “the latter settling on the rivers Meikong, Meinam, Irrawaddy, and Bramapootra,” ... “a third to the south [probably an advance of the previous one], is believed to tend toward Thibet and India, and in later times pours its hordes through the Himalaya, and forms the original population of India.” Analogy may be discovered in “the two streams or lines of Celtic migration,” which, says Bunsen (“Philosophy of Univ. Hist.” i. 148) “we may distinguish by the names of the Western and Eastern stream, the former, although the less direct, seems to be historically the more ancient, and to have reached this country (Britain) several centuries before the other.”

[36] I am throughout assuming acquaintance, on the part of my readers, with the third and fourth of Cardinal Wiseman’s “Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion;” for although my argument is distinct from that of the Cardinal, yet I everywhere regard his argument as the background and support of my position; and it is, moreover, part of the aim and intention of this work to show that the general ground and framework (this is, in fact, understating the truth) of Cardinal Wiseman’s argument remains intact. There is, I think, somewhere in the Cardinal’s works, a passage to the above effect, but I have not been able to recover it.

[37] If space allowed, I think the traditional lines might be indicated as plainly from the philological as from the ethnological point of view.

[38] “According to the sacred law-book, entitled the Ordinances of Menu, the Creator, that the human race might be multiplied, caused the Brahmin, Cshatriya, the Vaisya, and the Sudra (so named from Scripture, protection, wealth, and labour), to proceed from his mouth, arm, thigh, and foot.”—Brit. Ency. The “Fatimala,” a Sanskrit work on Hindu castes, says, “the other, i.e., the Sudra, should voluntarily serve the three other tribes, and therefore he became a Sudra; he should humble himself at their feet.”

[39] Homer’s expression (Od. i. 23, 24), that the Ethiopians divided in twain, were the most remote of men—

“????pa?, t?? d???? deda?ata? ?s?at?? ??d???,

?? e? d?s?????? ’?pe?????? ?? d’ ?????t??,”

approximates to the scriptural phrase, and seems to imply a wider dispersion than is suggested by Professor Rawlinson, i. 59.

[40] Tylor (“Primitive Culture,” i. p. 44) says, “The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phoenicians (?), Syrians, &c., and may have an older as well as a newer connection in North Africa. This family takes in some rude tribes, but none which would be classed as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for several thousand years, and there are well known and marked traces of early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya.” [Query, What is the nature of the evidence that they have survived, and have not degenerated?] Mr Tylor continues, “There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage. The gipsies and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks, with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu.” Compare infra, ch. v., and De Maistre, p. 272.

[41] Just as Hercules (vide Hercules, p. 180), who embodied in another line the tradition of Adam, is said by Mr Grote, “Hist. of Greece,” i. p. 128–9, “to have been the most renowned and most ubiquitous of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellenes,” so that “distinguished families are everywhere to be traced who have his patronymic, and glory in the belief that they are his descendants.” To whom would they trace back more naturally than to Adam?

[42] This must be taken in connection with what I have said, ch. x.

[43] At p. 88, Mr M’Lennan sees evidence of the “form of capture” and the fact of capture among the Jews; but he will at least allow the appeal to be made to the Scriptures, as their most authentic history. What do we find at the commencement? In the first marriage contract recorded, i.e. of Isaac and Rebecca? Why, the reverse of capture. Genesis xxvi. 8, “But if the woman will not follow thee thou shalt not be bound by the oath.” Also v. 39, 40.

Mr M’Lennan (p. 29), with reference to the hurling “stones and bamboos at the head of the devoted bridegroom in Khondistan,” says, “the hurling of old shoes after the bridegroom among ourselves may be a relic of a similar custom.” But this custom would seem to be much more directly traced to the custom among the Jews of taking the shoes from the man who refused to marry his brother’s widow (Deuteronomy), and which is more generally stated in Ruth iv. 7, as a token of cession of right—“the man put off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour, this was the testimony of a cession of right in Israel” (Ruth iv. 7).

[44] “Dr Latham would invert the order of development by producing the ruder fact—polyandry—from the less rude obligation. But clearly this is an inversion of the order of nature, which is progressive,” &c.—M’Lennan, “Prim. Marriage,” p. 206.

[45] It seems to me that Turner’s account of polyandry in Tibet, quoted by Mr M’Lennan, p. 193, gives plain evidence of the transition from the Jewish custom to the “regulated” polyandry. It is said “that the choice of a wife is the privilege of the elder brother.”

[46] “Instead of endogamy we might, after some explanations, have used the word caste. But caste connotes several ideas besides that on which we desire to fix attention. On the other hand, the rule which declares the union of persons of the same blood to be incest has been hitherto unnamed” (p. 49), and he terms it exogamy; and (p. 130) he says, “in all the modern instances in which the symbol of capture is most marked we have found that marriage within the tribe is prohibited as incest.”

[47] Mr M’Lennan (p. 148) says, “We shall endeavour to establish the following propositions:—1. That the most ancient system in which the idea of blood relationship was embodied, was the system of kinship through females only. 2. That the primitive groups were, or were assumed to be homogeneous. 3. That the system of kinship through females only, tended to render the exogamous groups heterogeneous, and thus to supersede the system of capturing wives.”

[48] “Aucune des trois chronologies bibliques, lÀ ou elles ne s’accordent pas entre elles, ne s’impose avec une autorite suffisante soit au fidele, soit au savant. L’Eglise catholique a laissÉ le choix libre entre ces chronologies et elles n’oblige pas mÊme À en adopter une.”—“Le Monde et L’Homme Primitif selon la Bible,” par Mgr. Meignan, EvÊque de Chalons-sur-Marne, 1869.

[49] 432,000 is also the figure to which Berosus extends the Assyrian chronology. Thus the Indian fabrication commences at the point where Berosus ends.

[50] Bunsen (“Egypt,” iii. 405) says, “Systematic Chinese history and chronology hardly go back as far as the year 2000 B.C., i.e. to the reign of YÜ (1991).” Yet upon indirect philological conclusions, he would really take their history back beyond the Egyptian—iii. p. 379. “An explanation must be given why it (the Chinese history) commences at a later period (as above) than Egyptian chronology; much later, indeed, than is generally supposed. Search must be made in other quarters than the regular extant chronology for proofs of that vast antiquity, which the numerous records of language compel us to assign to the origines of the Chinese.” This vast antiquity may be measured by the fact that, ex hypothesi, it transcends the Egyptian, and for the Egyptian in his theory of progress and development, he requires at least 20,000 years before the Christian era.

[51] Martini (“Historia Sinica,” p. 14, edit. Monac.) asserts that the Egyptians computed by the era of sixty years of Hoangho. See De Vignolle’s “Miscellanea Berolinensia,” I. iv. 37, on the cycle of months. Compare Ideler, App. ix., note from Bunsen, iii. 385. Humboldt (“Vues des CordillÈres”, p. 149; Prescott, Mex., i. 105) seems to say that, “among the Chinese, Japanese, Moghols, Mantchous, and other families of the Tartar race” (compare Mexican, do.), “their series was composed of symbols of their five elements, and the twelve zodiacal signs, making a cycle of sixty years duration.” This is not incompatible with, the allegation that it is “the era of sixty years of Hoangho.”

[52] This tradition would seem to confirm Bryant’s (“Mythology,” iii. 584) conjecture that Hoang-ti was Ham. But Hoang-ti as Ham, may absorb and incorporate, as we have seen in other instances, the history of his progenitors; and, moreover, whether he is Noah or Ham, would scarcely affect the chronological argument.

[53] On the worship of the pigeon in Cashmere, vide “Travels in Kashmir,” by G. G. Vigne, Esq., F.G.S., ii. p. 11, 13. 1844.

[54] The reduplication may have occurred in this way. Hoang-ti being Noah, Yao or Yu may have been his descendant under whom they settled in China at the termination of their migration. This is confirmed by Bunsen’s view, iii. 405 (iv. and v.) In which case it would not be at all unnatural to suppose that the traditions appertaining to the remote progenitor, would in time settle down upon the head of the actual founder. Chevalier de Paravey (vide Gainet, i. 93), “a trouvÉ un hieroglyphe chinois qui nomme la femme de Hoang-ti ‘Adamon’ terre jaune, et si non signifie celle qui entraÎne les autres dans son propre mal.” This would merely be the confusion between Noah and Adam which we have seen to occur in almost every instance. Is not the Japanese god Amida = Adima, or perhaps to Adamon—i.e., confused in relationship to Hoang-ti or Noah? what confirms the impression is, that Adima’s son is Canon. Query, Chanaan.

[55] Klaproth says:—“The only Sanscrit history deserving the name of the chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, Radja Paringin’i, translated by W. H. Wilson.”—Klaproth, Mem. Relatif À L’Asie.

[56] Compare the following account of existing customs in Cashmir with the above extract from Klaproth and ch. xi., with commemorative festivals of the Deluge. Mr G. G. Vigne (“Travels in Kashmir,” ii. 93) says:—“What has been poetically termed the feast of roses, has of late years been rather the feast of signaras or water-nuts. It is held, I believe, about the 1st May, when plum-trees and roses are in full bloom, and is called the Shakergal, from the Persian shakergan, to blow a blossom [the Mandan ceremony took place when the willow flowered.—Catlin, p. 6]. The richer classes come in boats to the foot of the Tukt, ascend it, and have a feast upon the summit, eating more particularly of signaras (water-nuts). The feast of the No-warh (new place) takes place at the vernal equinox [compare Noah, Taurus], at which period the valley is said to have been drained. It is held chiefly at the But or idol stone on Hari parbut.” Query—Can this be “the ark or big canoe” in the Mandan celebration? Considering the prominence of boats in all these mysteries, and considering the resemblance of but to boat, and the like analogies in so many languages (Sanskrit, pota = boat) (vide Vicomte d’Anselme, infra, p. 196), may we be permitted the conjecture until corrected. Compare also p. 268, Ogilby’s “Japan,” Cook. &c., p. 271.

[57] I have since found this identical tradition (vide p. 325) among the Mozca Indians. “Boshicha,” it is said, “taught them to build and to sow, formed them into communities, GAVE AN OUTLET TO THE WATERS OF THE GREAT LAKE, &c.” This seems demonstratively to prove, either that the Mozca Indians (South America) came from China, India, or Egypt—which I have contended for at p. 266—or else, which makes the argument I have in hand stronger, they have transmitted an identical tradition by a different channel.

[58] “The Chinese who migrated before the Deluge (sic) have no reminiscences, any more than the Egyptians, of the great catastrophe which we know by the name of the Flood of Noah” (Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iii. 397). Palmer (“Egypt. Chron.,” i. p. 38) says, with reference to a certain date—“This is only for such as know the true date of the flood, the end of the old world—an epoch by no means to be named, nor even directly alluded to, by any Egyptian.”

[59] “Principles of Geology,” tenth edition, 1868, ii. p. 471.

[60] The ground upon which Lyell pronounces this judgment is (ii. 479) “that no fragment of pottery has been found among the nations of Australia, New Zealand, and the Polynesian islands any more than ancient architectural remains, in all which respects, these rude men now living, resemble the men of the PalÆolithic age; when pottery is known to all, it is always abundant, and, though easy to break, is difficult to destroy. It is improbable that so useful an art should ever have been lost by any race of man.” The argument is strongly put, but many things are left out of consideration. Supposing the primitive knowledge, is not pottery one of the arts which would be most likely to be lost in a migration across the seas? Again, that they had no pottery, and that the PalÆolithic age had no pottery, shows that in the interval there had been no progress. When will there be? As to the circumstance that it is the same among the Australians and Polynesians, the fact cuts both ways. You assume that there is a uniformity in progress, but may not there be the same uniformity in the processes of degradation? and, assuming the fact, may it not simply prove that these savages have reached the same depth as the other savages?—Vide appendix to ch. xii.

[61] The following passage from M. A. Bastian’s article in The Academy, June 15, 1871, “On the People of India,” seems to me to afford an illustration in point—“The natural system becomes an indispensable necessity in every science, so soon as it is clearly seen that the question is not of classification, but of observation of, and insight into, law. Classification was long held to be the sole end, instead of being merely or mainly the means of study. As, in this respect, systematic botany gave place to vegetable physiology, so, in like manner, ethnology will have to look upon its classification of race—with which the school books hitherto have been almost exclusively occupied—as merely a preliminary step towards a physiology of mankind, and to a science of the laws which govern its spiritual growth.” Now, if no physiology of mankind, in the sense here intended, can be traced, and if “the science of the laws which govern its spiritual growth” (vide infra, an exposition of Mr Baring Gould’s theory) has come to no definite conclusion, then the only result, as far as science is concerned, will have been the revolutionising of its classifications, and the classifications of the different races of men (and, in so far as they have been accurately ascertained, their confusion will be matter of regret) is the legitimate and ultimate end of ethnology under normal conditions.

[62] Sir J. Lubbock’s “Prehistoric Times,” p. 313.

[63] It has almost passed into a proverb, says Morton—who is among those who know the Americans best—that he who has seen one Indian tribe has seen them all, so closely do the individuals of this race resemble each other, whatever may be the variety or the extent of the countries they inhabit.” Reusch’s “La Bible et la Nature,” vide also Card. Wiseman’s “Lect. on Science and Rev. Rel.” lect. iv., vide, however, Reusch, p. 498, where “a remarkable difference in the cranium” is noticed, “sometimes approaching the Malay, sometimes the Mongol shape.”

[64] That the negro has undergone modifications, seems established by the fact that we nowhere find all the characteristics of the negro united in any one case—unless, perhaps, in the case of the negroes of Guinea, to which I have alluded. Yet, in the people who border them, there has been noticed “un retour vers des formes superieures.” The Yoloss, “out le front ÉlevÉ, des machoires peu saillantes, leurs dents sont droites, et ils sont en gÉnÉral bein constituÉs, mais ils sont tout À fait noirs. Leurs voisins, les Mandingues, tiennent beaucoup plus du type nÉgre ... mais leur teint est beaucoup moins noir.”—De Bur. ap. Reusch, p. 505. But under no influences of climate has the negro ever become white like the European, or the European black like the inhabitant of Guinea; if they become darker, “c’est simplement la teint particulier À leur race qui gagne en intensitÉ.”—Burminster, ap. Reusch, p. 509.

[65] Captain Burton (ii. 165) also quotes a Catholic and a Protestant missionary as to this point. M. Wallon says, “Avec leur tendance À nous considÉrer comme rÉellement supÉrieurs À eux, et leur croyance que cette supÉrioritÉ nous est acquise par celle de notre Dieu, ils renonceraient bientÔt aux leurs idoles pour adorer celui qui nous leur prions de connaÎtre.” Mr Dawson says, “Fetish has been strengthened by the white man, whom the ignorant blacks would not scruple to call a god if he could avoid death.”

Assuming the identity of Bacchus and Noah, it is a striking circumstance, from this point of view, that the name of Bacchus, among the Phoenicians, was a synonymous term for mourning.—Vide Hesychius in Bryant’s “Mythology,” ii. 335; vide also the verses of Theocritus. Comp. p. 247, note (Boulanger).

[66] Perhaps Captain Burton’s phrase (ii. 178), “the arrested physical development of the negro,” may, if extended to his mental development, exactly hit the truth, the standard being fixed by the age at which we conceive the boy Chanaan’s development to have been arrested.—Comp. Wallace, infra, p. 91; comp. 217.

[67] “Annales de Philos. Chret.,” t. xiii. p. 235.

[68] The expressions in the latter part of this narration recall the blessing of Jacob, and suggests the possibility of the tradition having come through descendants of Esau.

[69] This is so much in tradition as to be a matter of common parlance—for instance, when the late Emperor of the French is depicted, this is the language which, upon a certain construction, appears most natural—“On the other side stands a phalanx of satirists, represented by Victor Hugo. The only colour on the palette of those artists is lamp black. Morally they paint the ex-Emperor as dark as a negro, array him in the livery of the devil, and then invoke the execration of history.”—Spectator, Sept. 17th, 1870.

[70] The italics are mine.

[71] The eye would be the very most apposite symbol for blackness, if we consider that blackness lingers there after the skin has become white, and, in the case of half-breeds, is the test of descent in gradations even beyond, I believe, the octoroon.

Captain King (“Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia,” ii. Append.) says, “That although there is the greatest diversity of words among the Australian tribes, the equivalent for ‘eye’ is common to them all.”

[72] Lenormant, “Manuel d’Histoire Ancienne,” i. 23, makes a similar suggestion as to this point—“La texte de la Bible n’a rien qui s’oppose formellement À l’hypothÈse que NoÈ aurait eu, postÉrieurement au deluge, d’autres enfants que Sem, Cham, et Japhet, d’oÙ seraient sorties les races qui ne figurent pas dans la gÉnÉalogie de ces trois personnages.” But two objections seem to me to be fatal to this view. The races about whom this difficulty would be raised would be the red and black races: why should it be surmised that the supposed posterity of Noah, after the Deluge, should have this mark of inferiority? In the second place, it does seem to be formally opposed to Gen. x. 32—“These are the families of Noe, according to their peoples and nations. By these were the nations divided on the earth after the flood.”

The red races might perhaps be accounted for by Gen. xxv. 23–25.

[73] There appears to me, however, a text to which attention might be directed. We know that the Ethiopians were black, but in Amos ix. 7, where God is expressing His anger against His people, He says, “Are you not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel, saith the Lord.”

[74] Vide also ch. x., p. 239. The tradition that Phoroneus, “the father of mankind,” distributed the nations over the earth, idem nationes distribuit.

[75] Vide ante ch. iv.; and also vide Palmer, i. 49.

[76] And yet, with the exception of Professor Rawlinson’s “Manual of Ancient History,” where mention is made of Mr Palmer’s work as among eight principal works to be referred to on the subject of Egyptian chronology, and of a series of articles in the Month on the same subject, I do not recollect to have seen allusion made to it. A previous perusal of the articles in the Month above referred to will greatly facilitate the study of this question.

[77] It will be understood that, in the above scheme and throughout, Mr Palmer assumes the existence of cotemporaneous dynasties elsewhere demonstrated. It is admitted, on all hands, that cotemporary dynasties ceased with the XVIII. Dynasty; and, in the other direction, all schemes commence with Menes. If, then, this interval of time is known or determined by one part of a scheme (as it is known from the chronicle to be 477 years), and at the same time, the exigences of the case (owing to fictitious additions) require the location of other figures within the interval, then the super-additions must overlap (apparently to those who know 477 years to be the true historical figure) at one end or the other. One hundred and fifty-six years (as above) is the extent of the overlapping (the 443 years of the cycle standing apart) in the scheme of Eratosthenes.

[78] Such appears to me to be the conclusion of Mr Allies in his learned work (“The Formation of Christendom,” ii. chap. viii. 57), “Universality of false worship in the most diverse nations the summing up of man’s whole history.” I request attention, however, to the following passage, at page 382, which has an especial bearing upon my argument:—“No doubt the Greek mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work. However, it is certain that in the sixth century B.C., the Greeks were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the public gaze. But in the absence of any hierarchy ... a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy religious belief, and re-acted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of religious service for instruction by religious discourse. In other words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain, therefore, was open to the philosopher, on which he might stand without directly impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which these priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites, scarcely any longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.”

[79] Take for instance Mr J. S. Mill’s peculiar views as to the status of women, “The law of servitude in marriage” [“Wives be obedient to your husbands,” St Paul], he says, “is in monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world” (p. 147). “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law,” id. But at p. 49, Mr Mill says, “The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother.” But he then adds (p. 37), “It will not do to assert in general terms that the experience of mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater than it would have been under the other system, experience does not say.”

Take in illustration, again, the communistic schemes as against the institution of property. Now, although Christianity has realised all that will ever be possible in the way of communism in its religious orders, the communistic sects have always instinctively directed their first efforts against religion as against the basis of the social order of things which they attacked. This was forcibly brought out in certain letters on “European Radicalism,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, October and November 1869, e.g. “all the contests on the three capital questions (‘government, property, religion’) which we are now engaged in, are but continuations of the original divergence of opinion (before settled government), considerably modified, of course, under the influence of time, the various traditional notions mankind preserves under the name of beliefs, and the whole stock of experience it has accumulated under the name of knowledge. So like, indeed, are the ancient and modern contests on these matters,” &c.... (Letter I.) Again (Letter V.), speaking of our English socialist discussing “the necessity of building social edifices upon material, not religious grounds,” the writer adds, that among continental socialists “no one thinks there of the possibility of matters standing otherwise;” and that in the socialist workshops of France and Germany it is well known “that the very basis of social radicalism requires the abandonment of all kinds of religious discussion, as matter of purely personal inclination, and the abolition of all kinds of privileges as incompatible with equality.” [All this has been put out of date by the deeds of the Commune and the programme of the “International Society”—viz. “The burning of Paris we accept the responsibility of. The old society must and will perish.”] The Spectator, December 1869, speaks still more explicitly:—“Infirm and crippled though she be, the Roman Church is still the only one who has the courage to be cosmopolitan, and claim the right to link nation with nation, and literature with literature. Such an assembly as the Council is, at least, an extraordinary testimony to the cosmopolitanism of the great Church which seems trembling to its fall; and who can doubt that that fall, whenever it comes, will be followed by a great temporary loosening of the faith in human unity—in spite of the electric telegraph—by a deepening of the chasm between nation and nation, by the loss of at least a most potent spell over the imagination of the world, by a contraction of the spiritual ideal of every church? This ideal, even Protestants, even Sceptics, even Positivists have owed, and have owned that they owed, to the Roman Church, the only Church which has really succeeded in uniting the bond between any one ecclesiastical centre and the distant circumference of human intelligence and energy. But if the consequence of the collapse of Romanism would be in this way a loss of power to the human race, think only of the gain of power which would result from the final death of sacerdotal ideas, from the final blow to the system of arbitrary authority exercised over the intellect and the conscience, from the new life which would flow into a faith and science resting on the steady accumulation of moral and intellectual facts and the personal life of the conscience in Christ—from the final triumph of moral and intellectual order and freedom. It would doubtless be a new life, subject to great anarchy at first; but the old authoritative systems have themselves been of late little more than anarchy just kept under by the authority of prescription and tradition; and one can only hope for the new order from the complete recognition that it is to have no arbitrary or capricious foundation.”

[80] “It is, upon the whole, extremely doubtful whether those periods which are the richest in literature, possess the greatest shares, either of moral excellence or of political happiness. We are well aware that the true and happy ages of Roman greatness long preceded that of Roman refinement and Roman authors; and, I fear, there is but too much reason to suppose that in the history of the modern nations we may find many examples of the same kind” (F. Schlegel’s “History of Literature,” i. 373). See also the account of the corruption of morals in Rome in the Augustan period (Allies’ “Form. of Christendom,” I. Lect. I.) “It is curious to observe that the more eloquent, polite, and learned the Greeks became, in the same proportion they became the more degraded and corrupt in their national religion” (Godfrey Higgins’ “Celtic Druids,” 1829, p. 207).

[81] “Il n’y a, Messieurs, que deux sortes de repression possibles: l’une intÉrieure, l’autre extÉrieure.... Elles sont de telle nature que quand le thermomÈtre politique est ÉlevÉ, le thermomÈtre de la religion est bas, et quand le thermomÈtre religieux est bas, le thermomÈtre politique, la repression politique, la tyrannie s’ÉlÈve. Ceci est une loi de l’humanitÉ, une loi de l’histoire.” Vide Disc. de Donoso Cortes (Marq. de Valdegamas), 4th January 1849; in which he pursues this remarkable parallelism throughout history.

[82] Montalembert (“Disc. de Reception,” 1852, Discours iii. pp. 614, 615, 621, 622) says of the Constituent Assembly of 1789—“It was the Assembly of 1789 which made the word revolution the synonyme of methodical destruction, of permanent war against all order and all authority.... It had that mania for uniformity which is the parody of unity, and which Montesquieu called the passion of mediocre minds.... In a word, the Constituent Assembly was wanting not only in justice, courage, and humanity, but it was also deficient in good sense. The evil which it created has survived it. It has made us believe that it is possible to destroy everything and to reconstruct everything in a day.... God has chastised it, above all, by the sterility of its work. It had had the pretence of laying the foundations of liberty for ever, and it had for its successors the most sanguinary tyrants who ever dishonoured any nation. Its mission was to re-establish the finances, the empire of the law, and it has bequeathed to France bankruptcy, anarchy, and despotism—despotism without even the repose which they have wrongly taken as the compensation of servitude. It has done more: it has left pretexts for every abuse of force, and precedents for any excess of future anarchy. [Montalembert could hardly have foreseen the last application of its principles which we have recently witnessed in Paris by the Commune, which, too, forsooth, was to have inaugurated a new era for humanity.] But it (this Constituent Assembly) founded nothing—Nothing! The ancient society which it reversed had lasted, in spite of its abuses, a thousand years.”

[83] From a purely philosophical point of view, why should these speculations of Mr Gladstone have been received “with more surprise and unfavourable comment” than any other “portions of his Homeric studies?”

[84] In one way, nothing is so uncertain as tradition, and, moreover, tradition is rarely positive and direct, but, on the contrary, prone to concrete into strange, fragmentary, and distorted shapes. As an instance, we may take the tradition which Genesis attests,—When Abraham’s hand had been stayed by the angel from the sacrifice of Isaac, ... “He called the name of that place ‘The Lord seeth.’ Whereupon, even to this day it is said, ‘In the mountain the Lord will see.’”—Gen. xxii. 14.

In illustration of the mode and manner of tradition, is the anecdote of Mr Hookham Frere, who states, that when the Maltese talk without reserve upon religious subjects, they say, “Everybody knows that Adam was the first man, but we alone know that he possessed fishing-boats;” which Bunsen says “Can be nothing but a Phoenician reminiscence.”—“Egypt,” iv. 215, the reminiscence of the legend of the Fisherman. Compare the Fisherman and his wife in Grimm’s “Popular Stories from Oral Tradition.”

[85] Vide “Bryant’s Mythology,” ii.

[86] After the exposition of his own theory, Mr Grote says—“It is in this point of view that the myths are important for any one who would correctly appreciate the general tone of Grecian thought and feeling, for they were the universal mental stock of the Hellenic world, common to men and women, rich and poor, ignorant and instructed, they were in every one’s memory and in every one’s mouth, while science and history were confined to comparatively few. We know from Thucydides how erroneously and carelessly the Athenian public of his day retained the history of Pisistratus, only one century past; but the adventures of the gods and heroes, the numberless explanatory legends attached to visible objects and periodical ceremonies, were the theme of general talk, and every man unacquainted with them would have found himself partially excluded from the sympathies of his neighbours.”—Hist. Greece, i. p. 608; comp. infra, ch. xi.

[87] “Ancient Law,” p. 117.

[88] “Pour trouver le veritable objet de ces derniÈres solemnitÉs, dont les motifs sont compliquÉs, nous nous attachons À analyser leur cÉrÉmoniel et À chercher l’esprit de leurs usages; et cet esprit achÈve de nous faire reconnaÎtre l’objet que nous n’avions d’abord qu’entrevu ou soupÇonnÉ, quelquefois mÊme il nous dÉveloppe encore la nature des motifs Étrangers et mythologiques, et ces motifs se trouvent pour la plÛpart n’Être que des traditions du mÊme fait qui ont ÉtÉ ou corrompuÉs par le temps, ou travesties par des allÉgories.”—Boulanger, _“L’Antiquite devoilÉe par ses Usages”_, i. 31.

[89] Vide other lines of tradition indicated in B. iii., C. iii., of De Maistre, “Du Pape.”

[90] Sir J. Lubbock, Intro. to Nillson’s “Stone Age,” xii.

[91] E.g., Mr Grote says, in his Introduction, that through the combination and illustration of scanty facts, “the general picture of the Grecian world may now be conceived with a degree of fidelity which, considering our imperfect materials, it is curious to contemplate.”

The Duke of Argyll (“Primeval Man,” p. 24) says—“Within certain limits it is not open to dispute that the early condition of mankind is accessible to research. Contemporary history reaches back a certain way. Existing monuments afford their evidence for a considerable distance farther. Tradition has its own province still more remote; and latterly geology and archÆology have met upon common ground—ground in which man and the mammoth have been found together.”

[92] Gibbon (“Decline and Fall,” i. 353) says, “But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the days of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters, and the use of letters is the principal circumstance which distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages, incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory ever dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge.” Compare with Coleridge, infra, p. 122; Ozanam, infra, ch. xiii.

[93] Eusebius (“Ecclesiastical Hist.,” ch. xxxvi.) says, speaking of St Ignatius—“He exhorted them to adhere firmly to the tradition of the apostles; which, for the sake of greater security, he deemed it necessary to attest by committing it to writing.” I do not remember to have seen this quoted in testimony and proof of ecclesiastical tradition.

[94] Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 29) says—“The first laws of all nations were composed in verse, and sung. Apollo, according to a very ancient tradition, was one of the first legislators. The same tradition says that he published his laws to the sound of his lyre; that is to say, that he had set them to music. We have certain proof that the first laws of Greece were a kind of song. The laws of the ancient inhabitants of Spain were verses, which they sung. Tuiston was regarded by the Germans as their first lawgiver. They said he put his laws into verses and songs. This ancient custom was long kept up by several nations.”

E. Warburton (“Conquest of Canada,” i. 214) says—“The want of any written or hieroglyphic records of the past among the Northern Indians was to some extent supplied by the accurate memories of their old men; they were able to repeat speeches of four or five hours’ duration, and delivered many years before, without error, or even hesitation; and to hand them down from generation to generation with equal accuracy.... On great and solemn occasions belts of wampum were used as aids to recollection ... when a treaty or compact was negotiated.”

[95] Vide H. N. Coleridge (“Greek Classic Poets,” p. 38–42), in speaking of the “Dionysiacs, the Thebaids, the Epigoniads, Naupactica, genealogies, and the other works of that sort,” p. 44, he adds—“Just as in the Indian and Persian epics, in the Northern Eddas, in the poem of the ‘Cid,’ in the early chronicles of every nation with which we are acquainted, one story follows another story in the order of mere history; and the skill and fire of the poet are shown, not in the artifice of grouping a hundred figures into one picture, but in raising admiration by the separate beauty of each successive picture. They tell the tale as the tale had been told to them, and leave out nothing.”

[96] According to the account which the Chinese themselves give of their annals, the works of Confucius were proscribed, after his death, by the Emperor Chi-Hoangti, and all the copies, including the Chu-King, were recovered from the dictation of an old man who had retained them in memory.

“The great moralist of the East” himself, Confucius, asserted—“that he only wrought on materials already existing.” Vide Klaproth ap., Cardinal Wiseman, “Science and Rev. Religion,” ii. p. 49.

In the article in the Cornhill Magazine, Nov. 1871, containing the valuable collection of Dravidian (South Indian) folk-songs, it is said, p. 577, that “they are handed down from generation to generation, entirely viv voce, and from the minstrels have passed into public use.”

[97] The Duke of Argyll (“Primeval Man,” p. 30) says—“Knowledge, for example, or ignorance of the use of metals are, as we shall see, characteristics on which great stress is laid” (by the advocates of the “savage theory”). “Now, as regards this point, as Whately truly says, the narrative of Genesis distinctly states that this kind of knowledge did not belong to mankind at first.... It is assumed in the savage theory that the presence or absence of this knowledge stands in close and natural connection with the presence or absence of other and higher kinds of knowledge, of which an acquaintance with metals is but a symbol and a type. Within certain limits this is true.”

[98] Presuming total ignorance of writing—its invention at any period seems to me much more marvellous than the discovery of printing after the invention of writing. For the rest we have seen that writing was known at an early period to the ChaldÆans and Egyptians, and probably to the Chinese and Japanese, and to the Medians (ch. xii.) Plutarch tells us that a law of Theseus, written on a column of stone, remained even to the time of Demosthenes.

[99] Phil. Hist.

[100] Burke (“Regicide Peace,”) says—“The practice of divorce, though in some countries permitted, has been discouraged in all. In the East polygamy and divorce are in discredit, and the manners correct the laws.”

[101] This was written before the appearance of Sir J. Lubbock’s chapter on “Marriage,” in his “Origin of Civilization,” to which reference is made at pp. 51, 52.

[102] A tradition of the constellations, a proof from tradition that they were so named in the ante-diluvian period.

[103] Sanchoniatho’s “Phoenician History,” by the Right Rev. R. Cumberland. London, 1720, pp. 2, 3, 23, et seq. Eusebius, PrÆpar. Evangel. lib. i. cap. 10.

[104] Vide Grote, i.

[105] This chapter was written before I became acquainted with Mr Palmer’s “Chronicles of Egypt” (vide ch. vi.) If the reader will refer to chap. i., he will there find a learned and exhaustive exposition of the ages of Sanchoniathon, identifying them with Scripture on the one side, and Egyptian tradition on the other.

[106] Is not this the meaning of the cxlvii. psalm, in the expression, “ante faciem frigoris ejus quis sustinebit”? Does not the psalm recount to the Jewish people, in rapid allusions, all that God had done for them, in contrast to the chastisements that had befallen other nations; and if it is objected that there is no allusion to the Deluge, unless in its indirect and beneficial influences, in the words, “flavit spiritus ejus et fluent aquÆ,” I reply that to the survivors, the Deluge, regarded largely, and in its permanent effects, was no calamity, but the commencement of a new and more favoured era.

[107] Compare ch. xiii. The successive ages of Hesiod, more especially the lines describing the iron age, parallel to the tradition, supra, “that in the fifth age men were named from their mothers.”

“No fathers in their sons their features trace,

The sons reflect no more their father’s face;

The host with kindness greets his guest no more,

And friends and brethren love not as of yore.”

—Hesiod.

President Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 21,) had noticed the ancient allusions to “kinship through mothers,” and his statement that “women belonged to the man who seized them first.... The children who sprang from this irregular intercourse scarce ever knew who were their fathers. They knew only their mothers, for which reason they always bore their name.” For this statement he also quotes Sanchoniathon, ap. Eus. p. 34, as his principal authority. But Sanchoniathon’s statement, as we have seen, refers to the ante-diluvian period, in which it is borne out by Genesis vi. 4.

There is one fact adduced by Goguet (i. 43), viz. that the Assyrians had an analogous ceremony which must be decisive for us, though not, perhaps, for Mr M’Lennan, that the custom of seizure was ante-diluvian, since the commencement of the Assyrian monarchy in the times immediately following the flood, is one of the best established foundations of history. Vide Genesis and Rawlinson.

“This race of many languaged man.” To any one who rightly grasps the bearing of the argument, the appositeness of this quotation will, I think, be rather strengthened than diminished by the evidence that the lines of Hesiod plainly refer to post-diluvian times (vide ch. xiii.)

[108] The Phoenician cosmogony seems to me to clinch the argument. There (vide Bunsen, Egypt, iv. 234), “The son of Eliun is called by Philo, Epigeios or autokhthon, ‘the earth-born,’ primeval inhabitant. By the latter of these expressions we have no doubt that Adam-Tadmon (‘the Kadmos of the Greeks,’ p. 195), the first man, the man of God, is implied” (“Eliun, i.e. Helyun, God the Most High,” p. 232).

There is an analogy in their confused tradition of the creation. “Eudemus says, according to the Phoenician mythology, which was invented by MÔkhos, the first principle was Æther and air; from these two beginnings sprang UlÔmos (the eternal), the rational (conscious) God” (Bunsen, iv. 179). Bunsen, (178) adds, “as regards MÔkhos the thing is clear enough; the old materialistic philosopher is matter, and that in the sense of primeval slime.” [Whence it has been suggested that we derive our word Muck, MÔkh, or MÔkhos.] This beginning Bunsen considers (p. 179) “a philosophising amplification of the simply sublime words of Genesis: ‘The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was over the face of the waters.’” Here we see the human reason hampered by the tradition that confused matter or chaos was somehow at the commencement, and with the conflicting tradition and conclusion of the intellect that it was, and must have been, created by a power superior to matter (“In the beginning God created heaven and earth”), emancipating itself, so far as to identify the Creator with the Æther and air, as nearer the conception of a pure Spirit, and personifying matter, and so shunting it aside as the “inventor of the mythology.”

[109] Vide De Maistre (ch. xii.)

[110] Max MÜller, “Chips,” &c., ii. 274. The Titans were also said to be “earth-born.” Bryant (iii. 445) says Berosus gives the following tradition of the Creation. Belus after deification being confounded with the Creator, as we have seen Prometheus, id. 104—“Belus, the deity above mentioned, cut off his own head, upon which the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out with the earth, and from thence men were formed. On this account it is that they are rational and partake of divine knowledge. This Belus, whom men called Dis, divided the darkness and separated the heavens from the earth,” &c.

[111] Compare Cicero, De Legibus, i. 8: “Est igitur homini cum deo similitudo;” and with Gen. ii. 26, 27: “and God created man in his own likeness.”

[112] “The Chinese cosmogony speaks as follows of the creation of man—‘God took some yellow earth, and He made man en deux sexes.’” This is the true origin of the human race. A Hebrew tradition says that it was of the red earth, which is the same idea. The Hebrew word “Adam” expresses this idea. This correspondence as to the manner in which the body of the first man was formed, between two people who have never had relations, is very remarkable. Indian and African cosmogonies relate that the name of the first man was ‘Adimo,’ that of his wife ‘Hava,’ and that they were the last work of the Creator.”—Gainet, La Bible sans la Bible, i. p. 74. I must note, too, the identity of the American Indian (supra and the Hebrew tradition, which is curious, as it might naturally be supposed that the tradition of the Red Indian took its colour from his own complexion.

Max MÜller (“Lect. on the Science of Language,” 1st series, p. 367) says of “man”—“The Latin word homo, the French l’homme, ... is derived from the same root, which we have in humus, soil, humilis, humble. Homo, therefore, would express the idea of being made out of the dust of the earth.” Bunsen also (“Phil. Univ. Hist.” i. 78) says—“The common word for man in all German dialects is ‘manna,’ containing the same root as Sanscrit ‘manusha’ and ‘manueshya.’ The Latin ‘homo’ is intimately connected with ‘humus’ and ?aa? and means earth-born; ?????p?? ?aa??e?e??, says Pindar. But what is ?????p???”

[113] “Last Rambles,” p. 324.

[114] The following tradition of the Tartar tribes seems to supply a link. In their tradition of the Deluge (vide Gainet, i. 209) it is said, “that those who saved themselves from the Deluge shut themselves up with their provisions in the crevices of mountains, and that after the scourge had passed they came out of their caverns.”

And compare, again, with the tradition of Kronos (Noah, vide Bryant’s “Mythology,” iii. 503)—“He is said to have had three sons (Sanch. ap. Euseb. P. E., lib. i. c. 10, 37), and in a time of danger he formed a large cavern in the ocean, and in this he shut himself up, together with these sons, and thus escaped the danger.”—Porph. de Nymphar. Antro., p. 109.

Bryant (“Mythology,” iii. 405) says—“I have shown that Gaia, in its original sense, signified a sacred cavern, a hollow in the earth, which, from its gloom, was looked upon as an emblem of the ark. Hence Gaia, like Hasta Rhoia Cybele, is often represented as the mother of mankind.” The following is very important with reference to my argument above:—The Scholiast upon Euripides says—“?eta t?? ?ata???s?? e? ??es?? ??????t?? t?? ???e??? p??t?? a?t??? s?????se? ??a???]. When the Argivi or Arkites, after the Deluge, lived dispersed on the mountains, Inachus first brought them together and formed them into communities.”—Comp. infra, p. 157, 158, 193, 332.

The instances adduced of myths connecting man with the monkey are, as a rule, traditions of degeneracy, i.e. of men turned into monkeys (vide Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” i. 340), and to which I would add the rabbinical tradition of men turned into monkeys at the Tower of Babel (De Quincey, Works, xiii. 235), and the classical epic of the Ceropes, “founded on the transformation of a set of jugglers into monkeys.” But if compared with the above tradition, I think that the only two instances (Tylor, i. 341) which seem to bear out the opposite theory will wear a different aspect. I quote from Tylor as above—“Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down upon as lower animals by the more warlike and civilised Malays, have among them traditions of their own descent from a pair of the “unka-putch” or white monkeys, who reared their young ones and sent them into the plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained apes. The Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had grown corn and eaten it, their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India, united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.”—Comp. Cecrops, &c., p. 332, infra.

[115] It occurs to me as possible that these various traditions may have had their foundation in the recollection of hardship, at some early period of their subsequent migration, which were transferred back and connected with their tradition of the altered state of things after the Deluge, arising out of the substitution of animal for vegetable food—of which the notion that man once lived on acorns may have been only an extreme form of expression. The following tradition of Saturn (vide infra, Saturn, p. 210), seems to tend in this direction: “Diodorus Siculus gives the same history of Saturn as is by Plutarch above given of Janus—?? ?????? d?a?t?? e?? ?e??? ???? eta??sa ?????p???.—Diodorus, 1. 5, p. 334. He brought mankind from their foul and savage way of feeding to a more mild and rational diet.”—Bryant, ii. 261.

[116] This fable of the tortoise is also among the Mandans, whom, Catlin (supra, 135) says, had no other tradition of the Creation than that they were created under the ground. Their tradition is confused with the Deluge, which dominates in their tradition.

“The Mandans believed that the earth rests on four tortoises. They say that “each tortoise rained ten days, making forty days in all, and the waters covered the earth” (vide “O-kea-pa,” p. 39, infra, ch. xi.) Does not this tradition of the tortoise decide the Oriental origin of the North American Mandans?

Falconer’s “PalÆontological Mem.,” 1868, i. 297, ii. 377–573, &c., “As the pterodactyle more than realised the most extravagant idea of the winged dragon, so does this huge tortoise come up to the lofty conceptions of Hindoo mythology; and could we but recall the monsters to life, it were not difficult to imagine an elephant supported on its back”(i. 27).

The New Zealanders have a curious tradition of their ancestors having encountered a gigantic saurian species of reptile, which must have been before they arrived in New Zealand. Vide Shortland’s “Traditions of the New Zealanders,” p. 73.

[117] I have elsewhere (vide ch. iv., et seq., x., xi.) traced the tradition of the Deluge, of the chronology of the world, &c., &c.

[118] Devil-worship is based upon the hypothesis that the evil spirit exists, and is the influence from which man has most to dread. Prudence suggests that it is wise to propitiate evil when it is powerful; and if “the existence of God is not assumed,” or the conception of God not yet developed, it is hard to see how the conclusion can be impugned; and (vide next page) Mr Baring Gould endorses Grimm’s opinion that man’s first “idea of God is the idea of a devil.”

[119] The most favourable review of Mr B. Gould’s work which I have seen says:—“In tracing the origin and development of religious belief, the object of Mr Baring Gould is to establish the foundation of Christian doctrine on the nature, the intuitions, and the reason of man, rather than upon traditionary dogmas, historical documents, or written inspirations. He is of opinion that the elements of true religion are to be found in a revelation naturally impressed upon the soul of man, and that the investigation of man’s moral nature will be found to disclose the surest proofs of his religious wants and destination. The author holds that if theological doctrines can be inculcated by demonstrative evidence of their harmony with man’s intellectual and moral constitution, they will be received with more perfect acquiescence and conviction than when appeals are made simply to man’s veneration for antiquity and authority.” I think I am, at any rate, right in taking Mr B. G.’s as the view most directly opposed to tradition, and it is from this point of view that I am brought into collision with him.

[120] Vide, however, Dr Newman’s “Grammar of Assent,” p. 386, et seq.

[121]

“The lively Grecian, in a land of hills,

Rivers, and fertile plains, and sounding shores,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In despite

Of the gross fictions chanted in the streets

By wandering rhapsodists, and in contempt

Of doubt and bold denial hourly urged

Amid the wrangling schools, a Spirit hung,

Beautiful region! o’er thy towns and farms,

Statues and temples, and memorial tombs;

And emanations were perceived, and acts

Of immortality, in nature’s course,

Exemplified by mysteries that were felt

As bonds, on grave philosopher imposed,

And armed warrior; and in every grove

A gay or pensive tenderness prevailed,

When piety more awful had relaxed.”

—Wordsworth, Excursion, B. iv.

[122] “Monotheisme des Peuples Primitifs,” in vol. iii. of “La Bible sans la Bible.”

[123] Mr B. Gould also says, p. 104—“The Semitic divine names bear indelibly on their front the stamp of their origin, and the language itself testifies against the insulation and abstraction of these names from polytheism. The Aryan’s tongue bore no such testimony to him. The spirit of his language led him away from monotheism, whilst that of the Shemite was an ever-present monitor, directing him to a God, sole and undivided. ‘The glory of the Semitic race is this,’ says M. Renan, ‘that from its earliest days it grasped that notion of the Deity which all other people have had to adopt from its example, and on the faith of its declaration.’”

[124] I append, however, the following passage from Mr Baring Gould, as it may be serviceable in tracing tradition, and to which I may have occasion to recur (p. 161):—“Among the American Indians an object of worship, and the centre of a cycle of legend, is Michabo, the great hare or rabbit. From the remotest wilds of the north-west to the coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundaries of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of Hudson’s Bay, the Algonquins are never tired of gathering round the winter fire, and repeating the story of Manibozho or Michabo, the Great Hare. With entire unanimity, their various branches, the Powhatans, &c., ... and the western tribes, perhaps without exception, spoke of this ‘chimerical beast,’ as one of the old missionaries called it, as their common ancestor (Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 162). Michabo is described as having been four-legged, monstrous, crouching on the face of the primeval waste of waters, with all his court, composed of four-footed creatures, around him. He formed the earth out of a grain of sand taken from the bottom of the ocean. It is strange that such an insignificant creature as a hare should have received this apotheosis, and it has been generally regarded as an instance of the senseless brute-worship of savages. But its prevalence leads the mythologist to suspect that some confusion of words has led to a confusion of ideas, a suspicion which becomes a certainty when the name is analysed, for it is then found to be The Great White One, or Great Light, and to be in reality the sun, a fact of which the modern Indians are utterly unaware.”

If Mr Baring Gould finds that the word Michabo also signifies “The Great Light,” or “The Great White One,” it goes far to identify the worship of the hare with the worship of the sun, more especially when it is noted (vide Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico,” i. 103) that the hare was one of the four hieroglyphics of the year among the ancient Mexicans.[A] Animal worship seems here plainly connected with sun-worship. But above and beyond it, do we not here also get a glimpse of more celestial light? “The Great Light” is also “The Great White One.” He is described as “crouching on the face of the primeval waste of waters.” In these phrases we seem almost to read the text of Gen. i. 3, “And God said, Be light, and light was made;” ver. 2, “Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the waters.”

The Indians also say that he “formed the earth out of a grain of sand taken from the bottom of the ocean.” Does not this not only embody the tradition that God created the world out of nothing, but also the mode of the creation by the separation of the water from the land: ver. 9, “God also said, Let the waters that are under the heavens be gathered together in one place; and let the dry land appear.... And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called seas.”

[A] These hieroglyphics were symbolical of the four elements. Prescott adds—“It is not easy to see the connection between the terms ‘rabbit’ and ‘air,’ which lead the respective series.” Possibly he may not have been aware of the tradition of the Algonquins as above.

[125] Is not “Num” cognate to “Numen?” and their worship of trees and worn stones worship of memorials of the Deluge? Compare Boulanger, infra, ch. xi., and on the regard for boulders in India (vide Gainet, vol. i.) Bryant (“Mythology,” iii. 532) says, speaking of the Egyptians—“I have mentioned that they showed a reverential regard to fragments of rock which were particularly uncouth and horrid; and this practice seems to have prevailed in many other countries.” Probably for the same reason the Lapps worshipped their lakes and rivers, as is known from the names annexed to them—“Ailekes Jauvre,” that is, sacred lake, &c. Vide Pinkerton, i. 468. (Leems.)

[126] This chapter was written before the publication of Mr Cox’s “Mythology of the Aryan Nations.” It will be seen, however, that I indulge the hope that much that is seductive, and much even that is systematic, in Mr Cox’s view, will be found to be compatible with the line I have indicated.

[127] Philo. apud Eusebius, who has transmitted the Phoenician tradition (vide Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iv. 281), seems to me to indicate the mode in which it came about in the following words—“Now Chronos, whose Phoenician epithet was El, a ruler of the land, and subsequently after his death, deified in the constellation of Kronos (Saturn),” &c. As to Saturn, vide ch. x.

In the cosmical theory there is analogy as to the process of deification—“In the Phoenician cosmogonies, the connection between the highest God and a subordinate male and female demiurgic principle is of frequent occurrence” (Bunsen, iv. 447). It would seemingly be more in fitness with a cosmical theory to find direct adoration of the principle, without evidence of any previous or concurrent process of deification.

Mr W. Palmer (“Egyptian Chronicles,” i. 37) says—“But when we find the rulers of the first two periods in the Chronicle, its xiii. gods and viii. demigods, answering closely to the two generations of the antediluvian and post-diluvian patriarchs in number, and therefore also in the average length of the reigns and generations; and when we know, besides, as we do, that the Pantheon of the Egyptians and other nations, which they said had all borrowed from them, was peopled, in part at least, with deified ancestors—for even the heavenly luminaries, and the elements, and powers of nature, and notions of the true God still remaining, or of angels and demons, so far as they were invested with humanity and sex, were identified with human ancestors; we cannot doubt that Kronos,” &c.

[128] “Venator contra Dominum,” St Augustine; “CitÉ de Dieu,” xvi. ch. iv.; Pastoret, “Hist. de la Legislation.”

[129] Gen. v. 24, says only—“And he walked with God, and was seen no more: because God took him.” (Vide also John iii. 13.) There might still have been the belief and tradition (according to appearances) that he was so raised. (Compare 4 Kings ii. 11, and Ecclesiasticus, xliv. 16.)

[130] I believe, however, that the apostasy in the Hamitic race generally was much more direct; and I entirely agree with Bryant that it must have resulted at an early period in a systematic scheme of mixed solar and ancestral worship. Therefore, in any Hamitic tradition, we shall not be startled at finding (even in the commemorative ceremonies of the Deluge) evidence of solar mythology inextricably blended with ancestral traditions. We, however, are only concerned with the ancestral traditions, and in so far as we can discriminate them, Mr Cox’s evidence of solar mythology will form no barrier to our inquiry.

In the preceding page I have quoted a passage from Sanchoniathon, which seems to indicate the mode in which the mixed system arose; but there “Cronos” (Noah) is deified in the planet Saturn. As a rule, however, we find him deified in the sun (Bryant, ii. 60, 200, 220). Ham, however, is sometimes also deified in the sun; and in cases where Ham is so deified, it is not unlikely that we shall find the patriarch relegated to Saturn.

[131] “Quoniam antiquitas proxime accedit ad deos.”—De Legibus, ii. 11.

[132] The adverse decision, in the matter of the ceremonies, did not, I apprehend, touch the question we are now considering, albeit the ceremonies had reference to deceased ancestors. This will be apparent, I think, from consideration of the grounds upon which the question was debated. The Jesuits relied upon the sense in which the ceremonies were regarded by the Mandarins and literary men whom they consulted, whilst their opponents supported their arguments by reference to the popular notions and the superstitious practices introduced by the Bonzes. (Vide Cretineau Joly’s “Hist. de la Com. de Jesus,” vol. v. chap. i.)

[133] “Notwithstanding his stature, beauty, hand, and voice, which constitute, taken together, a proud appearance, it seems as if Mars had stood lower in the mind of Homer than any Olympian deity who takes part in the Trojan war, except Venus only.”—Gladstone’s “Homer,” ii. 225.

[134] Vide infra, next chap. ix.

[135] Mr Cox (“Mythology,” p. xiv.) says—“Mythology, as we call it now, is simply a collection of the sayings by which men, once upon a time, described whatever they saw or heard in the countries where they lived. This key, which has unlocked almost all the secrets of mythology, was placed in our hands by Professor Max MÜller, who has done more than all other writers to bring out the exquisite and touching poetry which underlies those ancient legends. He has shown us that in this, their first shape, these sayings were all perfectly natural, and marvellously beautiful and true. We see the lovely evening twilight die out, &c.... They said that the beautiful Eurydice,” &c. (vide infra, p. 173). It would appear, however, from Mr Cox’s more extended work, “The Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” that the sayings of mankind in the mythic period did not extend to speculations as to their origin and destiny, or embrace the facts of their history, or the deeds of their ancestors, but that their whole converse was upon the sun and moon, and the phenomena of the outward world.

[136] Mr Max MÜller makes the distinction between “primitive or organic legends;” (and it is to these I wish to limit the discussion) “and the second, those which were imported in later times from one literature to another.... The former represents one common ancient stratum of language and thought reaching from India to Europe; the latter consist of boulders of various strata carried along by natural and artificial means from one country to another;” (ii. 245).

It is clear that Mr Max MÜller looks for harmony in his system—“We naturally look back to the scenes on which the curtain of the past has fallen, for we believe that there ought to be one thought pervading the whole drama of mankind. And here history steps in, and gives us the thread which connects the present with the past;” (p. 7). Why it was that harmony was not attained seems to be disclosed, if we read the passage in our sense and with a certain transposition of parts, at p. 3—“There were at Athens then, as there have been at all times and in all countries, men who had no sense for the miraculous and supernatural, and who, without having the moral courage to deny altogether what they could not bring themselves to believe, endeavoured to find some plausible explanation by which the sacred legends which tradition had handed down to them, and which had been hallowed by religious observances, and sanctioned by the authority of the law, might be brought into harmony with the dictates of reason and the laws of nature.” (Compare with infra, p.351, Maine.)

[137] Mr Max MÜller, in his essay on “Semitic Monotheism,” when opposing M. Renan’s view that the monotheism of the Semitic race was instinctive, seems to say this still more explicitly—“He thunders and Dyaus thunders became synonymous expressions; and by the mere habit of speech He became Dyaus and Dyaus became He;” (“Chips,” i. 358). “At first the names of God, &c., were honest attempts at expressing or representing an idea which could never find adequate expression or representation.... If the Greeks had remembered that Zeus was but a name or symbol of the Deity, there would have been no more harm in calling God by that name than by any other;” (359). It must be remembered that after the name of “Zeus,” or “Dyaus,” = sky, had been adopted, they still retained the conception of the Divine nature and personality, as is evidenced in the words of the oracle of Dodona—“?eÙ? ??, ?e?? ?stÍ?, ?e?? ?sseta? ? e?a?e ?e?,—He was, He is, He will be, O great Zeus!;”

Also (ii. 15) in the Orphic lines—

“Zeus is the beginning, Zeus the middle;

Out of Zeus all things have been made.”

If we are agreed upon this, then I have no contention with Mr Max MÜller; but with Max MÜller as an auxiliary, I direct my argument to the attack of Dr Dollinger’s position (“The Gentile and the Jew,” I. B. ii. p. 64)—“The beginnings of Greek polytheism,” viz., “the deification of Nature and her powers, or of particular sensible objects, lay at the root of all the heathen religions, as they existed from old time, amongst the nations now united under the Roman empire.”

According to Mr Lewes (“Hist. of Phil.,” i. 44), it was Xenophanes who first confused the sky with the Deity—“Overarching him was the deep blue infinite vault, immovable and unchangeable, embracing him and all things—that he proclaimed to be God.” (Contrast the Peruvian tradition, infra, p. 304.) St Clement of Alexandria (Strom. v. p. 601, Max MÜller, chapter i. p. 366.) says, on the contrary, that Xenophanes maintained that there was but “one God, and that he was not like unto men, either in body or mind.”

[138] Granting the tendency to nature-worship, I conclude that the conspicuous luminaries of the heavens would become primary objects of such worship. In amusing illustration of this I remember a friend of mine telling me that he happened to ask a young lad, the son of one of his tenants, who had just returned from a voyage to the Northern seas, how he liked his captain? He said, “Oh, he was an awful man—he swore by the sun, moon, and stars.” Still less do I deny the tendency to sun-worship. It was, as Gibbon tells us (ii. 438, iii. 150), the last superstition Constantine abandoned before his conversion, and the first to which Julian betook himself after his apostacy.

It may, moreover, be urged, that the sun figures in all these legends. I say, on the other hand, so also does the serpent. This serpent may be the serpent “of darkness,” and still be the serpent of tradition, but how darkness or night is aptly personified by a serpent I am at a loss to perceive. Then again the sun may always be only the symbol of what is bright and heavenly. But when (Max MÜller, ii. 171) we see this serpent Zohak, called by the Persians “by the name of Dehak, i.e., ten evils, because he introduced “ten evils into the world,” we cannot help recalling the profane expressions attributed to the devil when he saw the ten commandments—proscribing the ten evils in question.

[139] Mr Max MÜller may perhaps lay stress upon the circumstance that Baldr dies at the winter solstice. But this equally bears out the tradition noticed by Lenormant, that immediately after the Fall, there came upon the world a great cold. (Vide supra, ch. vii.)

[140] From the “Elder Edda.” (Quoted from Dr Dasent’s “Norsemen in Iceland.” Oxford Essays, 1858.)

[141] What is still more remarkable, the same tradition is found in the “Popol Vul;” (Mexican traditions), and as it is there given, fits in still more exactly with the solution I have suggested. It is there said that the first race of men were created “out the earth,” the third out “of a tree called TzitÉ.”[B] If the “Popol Vul;” came under Christian or European influences in the 17th century, it would have been more likely to have been brought into harmony with the Bible, rather than with either Homer, Hesiod, or the Edda. Let us pursue the myth a little further. Mr W. K. Kelly, “Indo-Europ. Tradition and Folklore;” (vide Max MÜller, ii. 197) says, “This healing virtue, which the mistletoe shares with the ash, is a long descended tradition, for the Kushtha ... a healing plant, was one that grew beneath the heavenly Asvattha,” which is elsewhere called “the imperishable Asvattha or Peepul (Ficus religiosus), out of which the immortals shaped the heaven and the earth,” which legend Mr Kelly further traces in the German Yggdrasil (although Mr Max MÜller from his own point of view dissents); at the foot of which tree (p. 207) “lies the serpent NidhÖggr, and gnaws its roots.” Neither Mr Max MÜller nor Mr Kelly discuss the point with reference to the view suggested above.

[B] Tiki was the great progenitor among New Zealanders.—Shortland, p. 56.

[142] Gen. i. 1, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth. 2. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. 5. And He called the light day and the darkness night; and there was evening and morning one day.”

In addition to the instances adduced by Gainet, it will be remembered that the Jewish sabbath was from evening to evening, and with us the astronomical day commences at noon, and the commencement and termination of the civil day at mean midnight.

In the second [Chinese] dynasty the day commenced at mid-day. Wei-Wang, the founder of the third dynasty, fixed it at midnight.” (Bunsen’s “Egypt,” vol. iii. p. 390.)

In the Phoenician cosmogony “the beginning of all was a dark and stormy atmosphere,” “thick, unfathomable black chaos.” (Vide Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iv. 176.)

The New Zealanders have preserved the tradition with still greater distinctness. “In the beginning of time was Te Po (the night or darkness). In the generations that followed Te Po came Te Ao (the light);” &c., &c. (Vide Shortland’s “Traditions of the New Zealanders,” p. 55.)

Vide Gladstone, “Homer,” ii. 155; Cox, “Mythology of Aryan Nations,” i. 15, on the relation of Phoibos to Leto. “This is precisely the relation in which the mythical night stood to the day which was to be born of her.”

Vide on this point Wilkinson’s “Ancient Egyptians;” (I. chap. xiii.) “The Mygale,” says Champollion, “received divine honours by the Egyptians, because it is blind, and darkness is more ancient than light.” The Arabs have the expression “night and day;” (vide Wilkinson). Aristotle says “The theologians consider all things to have been born of night.” The Orphean fragments call “night the Genesis of all things.... The Anglo-Saxons also, like the Eastern nations, began their computations of time from night, and the years from that day corresponding with our Christmas, which they called “Mother Night,” and the Otaheitans refer the existence of their principal deities to a state of darkness, which they consider the origin of all things.” (Vide Gen. i. 2, 3; id. p. 273–4.)

[143] “Gesta Romanorum,” tale xviii. Swan. Rivingtons 1824.

[144] On this point, that Prometheus is Adam, vide M. Nicolas’ “Etudes Philos. sur le Christ.,” 1. ii. ch. v. 30 (19th edit.)

[145] In like manner, the Peruvians recognised “Pachacamac;” (vide infra, p. 304), in the description which the Spaniards gave of the true God; and in so far as they had retained the monotheistic belief, this was true. Garcilasso de la Vega, a most competent witness who testifies to this, adds—“If any one shall now ask me, who am a Catholic Christian Indian, by the infinite mercy, what name was given to God in my language, I should say Pachacamac.”—Hakluyt Society, ed. of Garcil. de la Vega, i. 107.

[146] “This is not a mere arbitrary supposition, for it is expressly said in Holy Writ, that the first man, ordained to be ‘the father of the whole earth’ (as he is then called), became, on his reconciliation with his Maker, the wisest of all men, and, according to tradition, the greatest of prophets, who in his far-reaching ken, foresaw the destinies of all mankind in all successive ages down to the end of the world. All this must be taken in a strict historical sense, for the moral interpretation we abandon to others. The pre-eminence of the Sethites chosen by God, and entirely devoted to His service, must be received as an undoubted historical fact, to which we find many pointed allusions even in the traditions of the other Asiatic nations. Nay, the hostility between the Sethites and Cainites, and the mutual relations of these two races, form the chief clue to the history of the primitive world, and even of many particular nations of antiquity.”—Fred. Von Schlegel’s “Philosophy of Hist.,” Robertson’s trans., p. 152.

[147] Compare these epithets, and what was said above, of resemblance “to classical Hades,” with the following verses from the “Oracula Sybillina,” lib. i. 80—

[148] Osiris also is “the judge of the soul, or the god of the world of spirits.” “Osiris is never represented in an animal form, but is called the Bull” (infra pp. 203, 204), vide Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iv. 332. Bunsen’s own view is, that “the history of Osiris is the history of the cycle of the year, of the sun dying away and resuscitating himself again.” Mr Palmer (“Egyptian Chronicles,” i. p. 3) says—(and I think it as well that I should state that I had come to an almost identical conclusion, and had written this and the following chapter before I became acquainted with Mr Palmer’s profound and yet still neglected work, vide ch. vi.)—“The first human (‘Osiris = Adam and Isis = Eve’) having been thrown back into pairs of anthropomorphous deities (p. 2), the original Osiris and Isis, formed by the divine potter as parents of all, disappear in name, and are represented by Seb and Nutpe, while Osiris, Typhon, and Horus, the progeny of Seb and Nutpe, answers rather to Cain, Abel, and Seth, in the old world, and to the three sons of Noah in the new.... From Osiris-Seb (whether he be viewed as Adam or Noah) are derived downwards all the successive generations of Egyptian, gods and demigods, patriarchs, kings, and other men” [and for a parallel exposition of the Phoenician myth, vide Palmer, p. 53 and seq., “each dynast in turn, in the early generations, being identifiable at once with Seb and Osiris, as father of those following, with Osiris again by sharing the same mortality, and with Horus as renewing his father’s life and being the hope of the coming world. So each ancestor in turn went, it was said, to the original Osiris as patriarch of the dead, and to his intermediate Osirified fathers, and was himself Osirified like them, all making one collective Osiris.” [I have not space to discuss the question at what stage the mythology became pantheistic.] “Waiting for that reunion and restoration which was to come through successive generations by the great expected Horus, who was to take up into himself the old, and to be himself the new Osiris.”

[149] In a note to Cardinal Wiseman’s “Science and Revealed Religion” on Conformity between Semitic and Indo-Europ. grammatical forms, it will be seen that Ana in Chaldaic is the pronoun of the first person singular, and corresponds with the revealed appellation of the Deity, “I Am who Am” (Exod. iii. 14) = the tÒ ???.

[150] Max MÜller, Chips i. 153, refers to Dr Windischmann’s (“Zoroastrian Studies”) discovery that there are ten generations between Adam and Noah, as there are ten generations in the Zendavesta between Yima (Adam) and ThrÂstouna (Noah), and without controverting the point. Mr Palmer (“Egypt. Chron.,” i. 45) says—“And though the fancy of making the ten kings to begin only after 1058 years, and to be not all named from the same city, seems to distinguish them from Adam and the nine patriarchs his descendants, still Xisuthrus, the tenth, being clearly identified with Noah, by the flood and the ark, the very number ten, and the relation of the succession in which they stand one to the other, show that Alorus, the first of them, is no other than Adam.”

[151] Gainet (i. 211) quotes as follows from “Ceremonies Relig.” i. vii.: “The Mandans pretend that the Deluge was caused by the white men to destroy their ancestors. The whites caused the waters to rise to such a height that the world was submerged. Then the first man, whom they regard as one of their divinities, inspired mankind with the idea of constructing, upon an eminence, a tower and fortress of wood, and promised them that the water should not rise beyond this point.” Here seems a very analogous confused tradition of Adam and Nimrod, the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. Comp. with the distinct testimony to the Mandan tradition, infra, ch. xi.

[152] I find that the Egyptians had the same confused tradition respecting Menes, who stood to them in the same relation as Nimrod to the Assyrians (vide Bunsen’s Egypt, ii. p. 65). “The statement in Manetho’s lists that Menes was torn to pieces by a hippopotamus, is probably an exaggeration of an early legend, that he was carried away by a hippopotamus, one of the symbols of the god of the lower world. The great ruler was snatched away from the earth, to distinguish him from other mortals, just as Romulus was.”

[153] “Etienne de Byzance dit qu’À ‘Icone’ (‘de urbibus’ voce ‘Iconium’) ville de Lycaonie prÈs du Mont Taurus dans les rÉgions occupÉes par les habitants antediluviens regnait Annacus dont la vie alla au-dÉla de trois cents ans. Tous les habitants d’alentour demandÈrent À un oracle jusqu’À quelle Époque se prolongerait sa vie. L’oracle rÉpondit que ce patriarche Étant mort, tout le monde devait s’attendre À pÉrir. Les Phrygiens À cette mÉnace jetÈrent les hauts cris, d’oÙ est venu le proverbe: ‘Pleurer sous Annacus, ce que l’on dit de ceux qui se livrent À des grands gÉmissements. Or le DÉluge Étant survÉnu tous pÉrirent.... Dans ces rÉcits tout est conformÉ À la Bible. Annacus a vÉcu trois cents ans avant le DÉluge. Il a averti ses concitoyens: il est entourÉ du mÊme respect que le patriarche NoË lui-mÊme. Annacus parait venir d’Enoch; tout announce une identitÉ de personnages.” (Gainet, Hist. de L’Anc. et Nouv. Test. i. 94, 95.) The connection between the death of Enoch and the destruction of mankind may accord as well with the traditional belief in his reappearance at the end of the world.

Compare the Grecian tradition of Inachus, son of Oceanus (vide Bryant, ii. 268), and with it, Hor., Od. 3, lib. ii.:

[154] Vide his other epithets, infra, p. 239; also Rawlinson (Herod. i. p. 600), says that “upon one of the tablets in the British Museum there is a list of thirty-six synonyms indicating this god (Hoa). The greater part of them relate either to “the abyss” or to “knowledge.”

Compare this with the following verses from the “Oracula Sybillina,” i. ver. 145—

Now, without entering into the question of the authenticity of the Sybilline verses, I may at least quote them in evidence of the current tradition concerning Noah in the second century of the Christian era, supposing them to have been forged at that period.

[155] “Comment le nom du premier navigateur connu, tel qu’il se prononÇa en HÉbreu et qu’il nous est transmis par la GÉnese, ‘Noh, Naus, Noach,’ serait-il devenu le nom d’une arche flottante, d’un navire, en Sanscrit et en vingt autres langues? Nau, sanscrit; Naw, armenien; Naus, grec; (Navis, latin); Noi, hibernien; Neau, bas breton; Nef, nav. franc; Noobh, irlandais; Naone, vanikoro; Nacho, allemand vieux; Naw, timor; Nachen, allemand; _S’nechia_, islandais; _S’naeca_ ou Naca, anglo-sax.; _S’nace_, ancien anglais; Sin-nau, cambodge, &c.

“Enfin nous demandons comment le nom HÉbreu de l’arche de NoË. Tobe, prononcÉ comme on Écrivait gÉnÉralement en Orient, en sens inverse, donne le nom d’un vaisseau dans vingt langues qui sont des dialectes du Sanscrit? L’Écriture boustrophedone, qui fait les lignes alternativement À droite et gauche sans interruption a pu donner naissance À cette maniÈre de lire:—Boat, anglais; boite, franÇais; bat, anglo-saxon; boot, hollandais; bat, suedois, baat, danois; batr, islandais; bad, breton; bote, espagnol; boar, persan; batillo, italien; pota, sanscrit.” Vide other similar proofs from Vicomte d’Anselme’s “Monde PaÏen,” &c. In Gainet, i. 223, a curious additional instance of the same word having connections with “boat” and arc (tobe) might be discovered in Kibotos, the name of a mountain in Phrygia, where the ark is said to have rested (Gainet, i. 220). Also we have almost the same words—ark and arc—to express (though according to a different etymology) these dissimilar objects.

“The words oar and rudder can be traced back to Sanskrit, and the name of the ship is identically the same in Sanscrit (naus, nÂvas), in Latin (navis), in Greek (naus), and in Teutonic, Old High Germ. (nachs), Anglo-Saxon (naca).”—Max MÜller, “Comp. Mythol.,” p. 49.

I may draw attention, as having reference to other branches of this inquiry, to a possible affinity with the name of the patriarch, in the term Noaaids, applied by the Laplanders to their magicians (Pinkerton, i. 459, &c.); and to the term Koadernicks, applied by the Samoids to the same (id. 532). I own there might be danger in pushing the inquiry further, as I might even bring the patriarch Noah into contact and connection with Old Nick!

I may also refer to the term “Janna” (Janus), as applied to the officer “who had the office of entertaining ambassadors” at the court of Kenghis Khan (id. v. 7, p. 40; Rubruquis’s Embassy, A.D. 1253, also 56).

[156] Comp. “Traditions of the New Zealanders.”

[157] Do not the seven richis or sages correspond to the seven (or eight) (Phoenician) Kabiri. (There were seven or eight persons in the ark, accordingly as we take separate account or not of Noah.) As regards the Kabiri, their number (seven or eight, accordingly as we include “Æsculapius”) must be the clue to the solution of “the most obscure and mysterious question in mythology.” Bunsen (“Egypt,” iv. 229) says of an astral explanation:—“It does not enable us to explain the details of those representations which do not contain the number seven (or eight), and, in fact, seven brothers.” It will suffice, from our point of view, if there are numerically seven persons. Bunsen (iv. p. 291) says—“It is quite clear that the fundamental number of the gods in the oldest mythologies of Phoenicia, and all Asia, as well as Egypt, was seven. There were seven Kabiri, with the seven Titans. There are also seven Titans mentioned in other genealogies of the race of Kronos. Of the latter, one dies a virgin and disappears.” But as with the Kabiri we have seen the number seven, or eight, accordingly as Æsculapius is included or not, so (vide p. 314) we see the primitive gods of Egypt either seven or eight, accordingly as Thoth, “the eighth,” or Horus, figure as the “last divine king” (p. 319). When Horus so figures, “he is frequently represented as the eighth, conducting the bark of the gods, with the seven great gods,” &c. Moreover, it is elsewhere (p. 347) said that “the Phoenicians, in their sacred books, stated that the Kabiri embarked in ships, and landed near Mount Kaison. This legend was corroborated by the existence of a shrine on that coast in historic times.” [Query, The tradition of the Deluge localised, and the shrine commemorative of that catastrophe (vide Boulanger, &c., infra, p. 244); and supposing that the tradition of the number saved in the Flood had been preserved down to a certain date, we should then expect that the number would become rigid and fixed. But that if the tradition of the actual survivors had become indistinct, what more natural than that the eight principal characters of ante-diluvian, or even post-diluvian, history should be substituted for them, and that the same confusion and agglomeration of legend should take place as we shall see occurring in the tradition of Noah?]

In the Persian or Iranian legend of ShÂh-nÂmeh, “the three sons of FerÊdÛn—Ireg, Tur, and Selm—are mentioned as their patriarchs, and among them the whole earth was divided.” But in the more ancient GÂthÂs there is mention of “the seven-surfaced or seven-portioned earth.” [Query—apportioned by the eighth?] Vide Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iii. 478.

For the Indian tradition compare the following from Hunter’s “Bengal” (i. p. 151)—“Another coincidence—I do not venture to call it an analogy—is to be found in the number of children born to the first pair. As the Santal legend immediately divides the human species into seven families, so the Sanscrit tradition assigns the propagation of our race after the flood to seven rishis.” I also find in F. Schlegel’s “Philosophy of History” (p. 150, Robertson’s trans.)—“The Indian traditions acknowledge and revere the succession of the first ancestors of mankind, or the holy patriarchs of the primitive world, under the name of the seven great rishis, or sages of hoary antiquity, though they invest their history with a cloud of fictions.”

[158] Syncellus, quoting Berosus (vide AbbÉ de Tressan, “Mythology,” p. 10), says that Oannes (the mysterious fish, vide ante) left some writings upon the origin of the world. These, no doubt, correspond to the “Liber Noachi.” I do not disguise that this statement is probably derived from what is called the false Berosus. The reference, however, which I have made to these writings at p. 139 may raise doubt whether they did not embody true traditions.

[159] I fancy it might be traced also in the Phoenician fish-god, Dagon. The Saturday Review (June 4, 1870) in its review of Cox’s “Mythology,” says—“Dagon cannot be divided Dag-on, the fish ‘On,’ for a Semitic syllable cannot begin with a vowel; and if the necessary breathing ‘aleph’ were inserted (which it is very unsafe to do), it would then mean ‘the fish of On,’ which is not the signification required.” But it is the signification which would fit in here; moreover, might not the terminal “aon,” or “haon,” suggested, have been originally, i.e. before displacement by “boustrophedon”—Noa or Noah? I give this suggestion with all proper diffidence, and with some genuine misgiving as to the “breathing aleph.” I find that Bryant (“Mythology,” iii. p. 116) makes a similar suggestion.

Bunsen (“Egypt,” iv. 243) says—“Dagon is Dagan, i.e. corn. This is also implied by the Greek form of it—SitÔn, wheat-field (comp. p. 219). We have in the Bible, Dagon, a god of the Philistines, a name usually supposed to be derived from ‘dag,’ fish; the god has a human form ending in a fish, like the fish-shaped goddess, Derketo-Atergatis. It is clear, from Philo’s own account, that the Phoenician Poseidon was a god of this kind, and it is difficult to find any other name for him. Yet we cannot say that Dagon is very clearly explained. Here is a god of agriculture, well authenticated, both linguistically and documentally, Dagan, i.e. wheat, and he is the Zeus of agriculture.” Vide p. 219. P. 261 says Dagon must not be confounded with “Dagan,” but without reconciling it with the above at p. 243, on the contrary, we find “Dagon, Dagan = corn (the fish-man).” At p. 241, quoting from the text of Philo, it is said still more pointedly—“Dagon, after he had discovered corn and the plough, was called Zeus Arotnios.” Comp. p. 204.

Believing (vide ch. xii.) in the tradition of mythology, even among savages, I could not but be much struck on coming upon the following passage in Roggeveen’s voyage, to find—in his account of the Eastern Islanders—the same conjunction of the bull and fish implied in the traditional names of their idols:—“The name of the largest idol was called Taurico, and the other Dago; at least, these were the words they called to them by, and wherewith they worshipped them. These savages had great respect for the two idols, Taurico and Dago, and approached them with great reverence ... and to supplicate for help against us, and to call upon with a frightful shout and howling of Dago! Dago!” (“Historical Account of Voyages Round the World,” 1774, i. 469, 470.)

After showing the resemblance of a feast at Argos to other commemorative feasts of the Deluge, Boulanger (vide infra, i. 83) says—“Les Argiens avoient encore une autre fÊte pendant laquelle ils prÉcipitoent dans un abÎme un agneau.... ils Étoient armÉs de javelines, ils appelloient Bacchus au son des trompettes et l’invitoient _À semontrer hors de l’eau_; cette apparition n’arrivoit pas frÉquemment sans doute” (comp. supra, 197, and 237). “Plutarque remarque que lors qu’ils prÉcipitoient l’agneau, ils avoient soin de cacher leurs trompettes et leurs javelines. Nous ne prÉtendons point expliquer tous ces mystÈres.” Is it that they feared, with armed weapons in their hands, to evoke the apparition of the old man “whose conquests were all peaceful” (p. 216), and who, as Manco Capac (p. 326), “shut his ears when they spoke to him of war.”

[160] This closely corresponds to the description of Oannes given by Sanchoniathon, “Ap. Euseb.” (Bryant, ii. 301), i.e. with two heads (comp. infra, p. 220), the human head being placed below the head of a fish:—“????? ?efa??? ?p??at? t?? t?? ?????? ?efa???.”

[161] Vide similar traditions of the man-bull in India and Japan. Bryant, iii. 589, who adds, “We shall find hereafter that in this (Parsee) mythology there were two ancient personages represented under the same character, and named L’Homme Taureau; each of whom was looked upon as the father of mankind.” Compare pp. 158, 189, the two Menus and the two Osiris.

[162] The prayer used in the worship of Dionysos at Elis, preserved by Plutarch, ended with “???e ?a??e—???e ?a??e,” worthy bull! (vide Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iv. 446.) Compare p.215 with Dionysius = Bacchus = Noah; also of the three Samothracian names of the Kabiri—viz., Axieros, Axiokerse, Axiokersos. Bunsen says, “the syllable Axi or Axie which is found in all three, cannot be anything but the Greek word ‘Axios,’ which was used in the worship of Dionysos at Elis” (id., vide infra).

On this symbol of the bull in connection with Noah and the Ark vide Bryant (ii. 416, et seq. 439). He says, “Every personage that had any connection with the history of the Ark was described with some reference to this hieroglyphic ... that the Apis and Mnenis (Menes) were both representations of an ancient personage is certain; and who that personage was may be known from the account given of him by Diodorus. He speaks of him by the name of Mnenes, but confines his history to Egypt, as the history of Saturn was limited to Italy; Inachus and Phoroneus to Argos; Deucalion to Thessaly ... the same person who in Crete was styled Minos, Min-nous, and whose city was Min-Noa; the same who was represented under the emblem of Men-taur, or Mino-taurus (Minotaur). Diodorus speaks of Mnenes as the first lawgiver,” &c., &c.... [Mnenes or Menes may embody traditions of Noah and Misraim, as Osiris does of Adam and Noah.] At p. 422–435 [plate], we find Menes represented as a bull with the sacred dove.... Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) says the bulls, Apis and Mnenes, were sacred to Osiris ... and Eustath. (in Dion. v. 308) says of the Tauric Chersonese, “that the Tauric nation was so named from the animal Taurus or bull, which was looked upon as a memorial of the great husbandman Osiris, who first taught agriculture, and to whom was ascribed the invention of the plough.” ... Lycophron (v. 209 and scholia) says, ?a????, ?????s??. Plutarch says Dionusus (vide supra, p. 203) was styled ????e???, or the offspring of a bull, by the people of Argos, who used to invoke him as a resident of the sea, and entreat him to come out of the waters. The author of the Orphic hymns calls him “Taurogenes.” ?a????e??? ?????s?? e?f??s???? p??e T??t???. ?a????e???, is precisely of the same purport as T?a??e??? [ark-born], and the words of this passage certainly mean “that the ark-born deity Dionusus restored peace and happiness to mortals.” [Noah’s name in Scripture signifies “peace and consolation”— ??e ??a?s?a?apa?s?? (rest), Hesychius.]... The title given to Diana—viz. Taurione, is remarkable, for “Taurus was an emblem of the Ark, and by Taurione was signified the arkite dove.” Taurus, and ione from ???a? of the Greeks, and Ionas of the eastern nations = dove, and curiously in an inscription in Gruter, Diana is at the same time called “Regina undarum,” and “decus nemorum” (Bryant, ii. 434). The connection of Diana, Juno, and Venus with the dove and rainbow is very striking, but would lead to too long a digression. So, too, would a discussion as to how Noah or the Ark (secondarily) came to be associated with the bull, as a hieroglyphic. Compare the above with the ox-heads and bull dance in the Mandan commemoration of the Deluge, infra, ch. xi.

[163] Since writing the above I have found the following note in Rawlinson’s “Herodotus,” i. 623, on Ninip:—“There is, however, another explanation of the name Bar-sam or Bur-shem, of which some notice must be taken. It has been already stated that if the Noachid triad be compared with the Assyrian, Ana will correspond with Ham, Bel-Nimrod with Shem, and Hoa with Japhet.”

The following passage, also from Rawlinson’s “Herodotus,” i. 609, appears to me valuable in proof of the transition from ancestral to solar worship, or at least of their interfusion:—“The sun was probably named in Babylonia both San and Sanei, before his title took the definite Semitic form of Shamas, by which he is known in Assyrian and in all the languages of that family.” Now, standing by itself, this might not appear very significant; but compare it with the following passages connecting Ham with the sun:—“By the Syrians the sun and heat were called ... Chamba; by the Persians, Hama; and the temple of the sun, the temple of Ammon or Hammon.” Mr Bryant shows that Ham was esteemed the Zeus of Greece and the Jupiter of Latium. Mr G. Higgins’ “Anacalypsis,” p. 45. Bryant says, “the worship of Ham, or the sun, as it was the most ancient, so it was the most universal of any in the world.” These passages may possibly be so interpreted as to support a solar theory, but is it not at least suspicious to see the name of the central luminary so apparently identified with historical characters whose memory is distinctly preserved aliunde in the traditions of their descendants? Compare Nimrod, ch. viii. 164, et seq.

[164] Rawlinson says that there is no doubt that Nebo represents the planet Mercury, and between the attributes of Mercury or Hermes, the epithets of Nebo, and the traditions concerning Shem, there is something in common. He is the god of eloquence and persuasion—the god of alliances and peace. “He contributed to civilise the manners and cultivate the minds of the people.” “He united them by commerce and good laws.” The Egyptian Mercury or Thaut first invented landmarks. Finally, “He was consulted by the Titans, his relations, as an augur, which gave occasion to the poets to describe him as interpreter of the will of the gods.”—_L’Abbe de Tressan, “Mythology.”_

[165] “Notwithstanding the difficulty of ascending to so distant a period, there will always be found some traces by which truth may be discovered.... The historian Josephus relates that the ChaldÆans from the earliest times carefully preserved the remembrance of past events by public inscriptions on their monuments. He says they caused these annals to be written by the wisest men of their nation.”—_L’Abbe de Tressan, “Hist. of Heathen Mythology.”_ London, 1806.

[166] I had come to the above conclusion upon the perusal of Rawlinson, and before I had read Bryant, who, I find, had already come to this identical conclusion. (“Mythology,” iii. 109.) Speaking of Berosus’ account of Oannes and Xisuthrus, he says, “The latter was undoubtedly taken from the archives of the ChaldÆans. The former is allegorical and obscure, and was copied from hieroglyphical representations which could not be precisely deciphered.... In consequence of his borrowing from records so very different, we find him, without his being apprized of it, giving two histories of the same person. Under the character of the man of the sea, whose name was Oannes, we have an allegorical representation of the great patriarch; whom in his other history he calls Sisuthrus.”

[167] Bochart also says (Geog. Sacra, lib. i.) “Noam esse Saturnum tam multa docent, ut vix sit dubitandi locus.”

[168] “Cum falce, messis insigne.”—Macrobius, “Saturn.”

[169] Sanchoniathon, vide supra M’Lennan (ch. vii.)

[170] Bryant (Mythology, ii. 261) says:—“He is by Lucian made to say of himself ??de?? ?p' ??? d????? ??. The Latins in great measure confine his history to their own country, where, like Janus, he is represented as refining and modelling mankind, and giving them laws. At other times he is introduced as prior to law; which are seeming contrarieties very easy to be reconciled.” There were traditions also of Saturn in Crete and Sparta.—Bryant, iii. 414.

[171] Vide supra, p. 211.

[172] An indirect argument in proof of the identity of Saturn and Noah might be adduced if I had space to incorporate Boulanger’s evidence of the ceremonies among the ancients’ commemoration of the Deluge, (“Vestiges d’usages hydrophoriques dans plusieurs fÊtes anciennes et modernes”). This being assumed, is it not of some significance that when the Roman pontiffs proceeded to the banks of the Tiber to perform their annual (commemorative) ceremonial, that they should make their expiatory sacrifices to Saturn? The points that Bryant takes (ii. 262) are very striking:—“He was looked upon as the author of time, ‘Ipse qui auctor temporum’ (Macrob. i. 214). [His medals had on the reverse the figure of a ship.] They represented him as of an uncommon age, with hair white as snow; they had a notion that he would return to second childhood. ‘Ipsius autem canities primosis nivibus candicabat; licet etiam ille puer posse fieri crederetur.’—Martianus Capella. Martial’s address to him, though short, has in it something remarkable, for he speaks of him as a native of the former world—

I have mentioned that he was supposed, ?atap??e??, to have swallowed up his children; he was also said to have ruined all things; which, however, were restored with a vast increase.”—Orphic Hymn, 12, v. 3. Compare Calmet, supra, pp. 211 and 212.

Martianus Capella and Varro de Ling. Lat. lib. i. 18, call him Sator, a sower, “Saturnus Sator.” Now it is curious that the ancient Germans had a god “of the name of Sator.” He is described by Verstegan as “standing upon a fish, with a wheel in one hand, and in the other a vessel of water filled with fruits and flowers.”

N.B.—I was surprised to find in Carver’s “Travels in North America” (p. 282) the phrase among the North American Indians, of things being done at the instigation “of the Grand Sautor.”

[173] “Saturn is by Plato supposed to have been the son of Oceanus.”—Bryant, ii. 261.

[174] Vide Autochthones, ch. vii.

[175] “The Scriptures tell us that Noah cultivated the vine; and all profane historians agree in placing Bacchus in the first ages of the world” (in proof of early cultivation of the vine).—Goguet, “Origin of Laws,” i. 116. Compare supra, p. 213, “Saturnus Sator.” Bryant says, “The history of Dionusus is closely connected with that of Bacchus, though they are two distinct persons.” He supposes Dionusus to be Noah, and Bacchus Ham. But he may very well have embodied the traditions of both. Pausanius (lib. iii. 272) says Dionusus was exposed in an ark and wonderfully preserved. He was also said to have been twice born, and to have had two fathers and two mothers, in allusion to the two periods of his existence separated by the Deluge.

Dionusus (Orphic Hymn, 44, 1) is addressed as ???e, a?a? ?????se, p???sp??e ta????et?pe.

[176] The phrase “Father Bacchus,” current among the ancients (vide Hor. Odes. i. xviii.) has always struck me as singular. It is perfectly congruous with the tradition of Noah; but who will tell us its appropriate solar or astral application?

[177] MontfauÇon, from whom I have quoted, was simply an antiquarian—a very erudite and laborious antiquarian, but one whose sole concern was to discriminate facts without reference to their bearings, and who would have had, I have little doubt, a supreme contempt for the speculations in which I have indulged. He says in his preface—“I have a due regard for those great men who have excelled in this sort of learning, but must own at the same time I have no taste for it.... It signifies very little to us to know whether they who tell us Vulcan was the same with Tubalcain, or they who say he was the same with Moses, make the best guess in the matter.” Though the general opinion may not incline any more now than then to the biblical interpretation, yet I think a great change has taken place in public opinion as to the importance of the inquiry.

Triptolemus was also said to have been “the inventor of the plough and of agriculture, and of civilisation, which is the result of it,” and to have instituted the Elusinian mysteries. Like Bacchus he is also said to have “ridden all over the earth, making men acquainted with the blessings of agriculture.”—Smith. Myth. Dict.; vide also infra, p.224: “Deucalion.”

[178] Dionusus like Bacchus came to India from the west.—Philostratus, lib. ii. 64; Byrant, ii. 78. The Indian Bacchus “appears in the character of a wise and distinguished oriental monarch; his features an expression of sublime tranquillity and mildness.”—Smith, Myth. Dic.

[179] This appears to me still more apparent in the 26th Idyll of Theocritus, where, when the Bacchanals were at their revels,

(For profaning thus “these mysteries weird that must not be profaned by vulgar eyes,” Pentheus is torn to pieces by the Bacchanals)....

This seems to bear out what is perhaps only vaguely implied in the sacred text that the curse was on Chanaan—the boy and his posterity—and not on the whole race of Cham.—Vide ante: also compare the “BacchÆ” of Euripides, in the following passage from Grote’s “Plato” (iii. 333):—“So in the ‘BacchÆ’ of Euripides, the two old men, Kadmus and Teiresias, after vainly attempting to inculcate upon Pentheus the belief in and the worship of Dionysus, at last appeal to his prudence and admonish him of the danger of unbelief;” which, if it be tradition, would look as if Chanaan’s offence was only the final and overt expression of previous unbelief.

[180] Vide Dr Smith’s “Myth. Dict.” art. Janus:—“Whereas the worship of Janus was introduced at Rome by Romulus, that of Sol was instituted by Titus Tatius.”

[181] If Janus is allowed to have been identified with Saturn (supra) we may see through the analogy of Saturn how these secondary functions came to be attributed to him—Saturn was also Chronos [that Chronos = Noah, vide Palmer’s Egypt. Chron., i. p. 60]; “but,” as Dr Smith says, “there is no resemblance between the deities, except that both were regarded as the most ancient deities in their respective countries.” As Chronos simply personifies antiquity itself, this only means that Saturn was the most ancient deity. When subsequently he became merged in “Chronos,” his ancient sickle became converted into a scythe. Dr Smith (“Dict. Myth.”) says, “He held in his hand a crooked pruning knife, and his feet were surrounded with a woollen riband;” and Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 94) says, “All old traditions speak of the sickle of Saturn, who is said to have taught the people of his time to cultivate the earth.”—Plut. i. p. 2, 275; Macrob. Sat., lib. i. 217.

Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 283) says, “Several critics are of opinion that the Janus of the ancients is the same with Javan the son of Japhet, Gen. x. 3.”

It may afford a clue if I advert to the circumstance that whilst in the Phoenician alphabet (vide Bunsen’s Egypt. iv. 290, 293, 297), Dagon, Dagan = Corn (the Fish-man, vide supra, p. 200), stands for the letter D. “The door” is its hieroglyphic equivalent. Thus we get in strange juxtaposition what we may call symbols, connecting Janus with the Fish-god and with the god of agriculture.—Vide supra, p. 200, and infra.

[182] Bryant (“Mythology,” ii. 254) says, “Many persons of great learning have not scrupled to determine that Noah and Janus were the same. By Plutarch he is called ?a????, and represented as an ancient prince who reigned in the infancy of the world.... He was represented with two faces, with which he looked both forwards and backwards; and from hence he had the name of Janus Bifrons. One of these faces was that of an aged man; but in the other was often to be seen the countenance of a young and beautiful personage. About him ... many emblems.... There was particularly a staff in one hand, with which he pointed to a rock, from whence issued a profusion of water. In the other hand he held a key.... He had generally near him some resemblance of a ship.... Plutarch does not accede to the common notion” (that it was the ship that brought Saturn to Italy), “but still makes it a question why the coins of this personage bore on one side the resemblance of Janus Bifrons, and on the other the representation of either the hind part or the fore part of a ship.... He is said to have first composed a chaplet, and to him they attributed the invention of a ship. Upon the Sicilian coins (at the temple) of Eryx his figure often occurs with a twofold countenance, and on the reverse is a dove encircled with a crown, which seems to be of olive. He is represented as a just man and a prophet (comp. pp. 207–208), and had the remarkable characteristics of being in a manner the author of time and the god of the year.”

[183] “Megasthenes stated that the first king (of India) was Dionysus. He found a rude population in a savage state, clothed in skins, unacquainted with agriculture, and without fixed habitations. The length of his reign is not given. The introduction of civilization and agriculture is a natural allusion to the immigration of the Aryans into a country inhabited by Turanian races.... Fifteen generations after Dionysus, Hercules reigned.... Now all this is obviously pure Indian tradition. Dionysus is the elder Manu, the divine primeval man, son of the Sun (Vivasvat). He holds the same position in the primeval history of India as does Jima or Gemshid, another name of the primeval man in the Iranian world.... The first era, then, is represented by Megasthenes as having fourteen generations of human kings, with a god as the founder and a god as the destroyer of the dynasty, in all fifteen or sixteen generations.”—Bunsen’s Egypt, iii. 528. Compare those fifteen generations with Palmer. Compare the confusion of Dionysus and Hercules with Deucalion and Prometheus, &c., p. 232. Pelasgus among the Arcadians passed for the first man and the first legislator (Boulanger, i. 133). Of Cadmus, too, it is said—“Greece is indebted to him for alphabetical writing, the art of cultivating the vine, and the forging and working of metals.”—Goguet, ii. 41.

[184] Vide supra, Oannes, ch. ix.; vide Smith, “Myth. Dict.”

[185] “All nations have given the honour of the discovery of agriculture to their first sovereigns. The Egyptians said that Osiris (vide supra, p. 204) made men desist from eating each other, by teaching them to cultivate the earth. The Chinese annals relate that Gin-Hoang, one of the first kings of that country, invented agriculture, and by that means collected men into society, who before had wandered in the fields and woods like brute beasts.” (Goguet, “Origin of Laws.”) I need not remind the reader that Goguet’s learned work is not written from our point of view. Compare infra, p. 240.

[186] Vide, chap. xiii. Golden age, Mexican tradition.

[187] Although the greater number of these traditions have been localised, yet in almost every case we shall find embodied in them some one incident or other of the universal Deluge, as recorded by Moses. Kalisch (“Hist. and Crit. Commentary on the Old Testament”) says:—“It is unnecessary to observe that there is scarcely a single feature in the biblical account which is not discovered in one or several of the heathen traditions; and the coincidences are not limited to desultory details, they extend to the whole outlines, and the very tenor and spirit of the narrative; ... and it is certain that none of these accounts are derived from the pages of the Bible—they are independent of each other.... There must indisputably have been a common basis, a universal source, and this source is the general tradition of primitive generations.”

It is not, I think, generally known how widespread these traditions are. L’AbbÉ Gainet has collected some thirty-five (“La Bible sans la Bible”); but Mr Catlin (vide infra, p.245) says he found the tradition of a deluge among one hundred and twenty tribes which he visited in North, South, and Central America. This accords with Humboldt’s testimony (Kalisch, i. 204), who “found the tradition of a general deluge vividly entertained among the wild tribes peopling the regions of Orinoco.” To these I must add the evidence of the indirect testimony of the commemorative ceremonies which I have collected in another chapter (vide p. 242). It has been said that the Chinese tradition is too obscure to be adduced, but we shall see (p. 65) whether, when in contact with other traditions, it cannot be made to give light; and I shall refer my readers to the pages of Mr Palmer (supra, p. 71) for evidence of the tradition in Egypt, where it had heretofore been believed that no such evidence was to be found. In India (vide ch. ix.) the tradition is embodied in the history of Manu and the fish; and Bunsen (“Egypt,” iii. 470) admits “that there is evidence in the Vedas, however slight, that the flood does form a part of the reminiscences of Iran.” Vide also p. 68, evidence of the tradition in Cashmere. I wish also to direct attention here to two recent and important testimonies to the existence of the tradition in India and the Himalayan range. At pp. 151 and 450 of Hunter’s “Bengal,” it will be seen that the Santals have a distinct tradition of the Creation, flood, intoxication of Noah, and the dispersion; and of the Vedic evidence, which Bunsen (supra, 223) calls slight, Mr Hunter says:—“On the other hand, the Sanscrit story of the Deluge, like that in the Pentateuch, makes no mystery of the matter. A ship is built, seeds are taken on board, the ship is pulled about for some time by a fish, and at last gets on shore upon a peak of the Himalayas.” Dr Hooker (“Himalayan Journal,” ii. 3) says:—“The Lepchas have a curious legend of a man and woman having saved themselves on the summit of Tendong (a very fine mountain, 8613 feet) during a flood which once deluged Sikhim,” which he authenticates on the spot. Here, as in many of Mr Catlin’s instances of local tradition, I may observe that the event as recorded proves the universality of the Deluge for the rest of the world, or at least all the world below the level of Tendong. In speaking, however, of the universal Deluge (universal as far as the human race are concerned), I do not enter into the geological argument, or exclude the view (permissible I believe, vide Reusch, p. 368, and note to Rev. H. J. Coleridge’s fourth sermon on “The Latter Days”) that it was not geographically universal. I merely adhere to the testimony of tradition, and from this point of view it would suffice (vide Reusch) that it was universal so far as the horizon of the survivors extended.

[188] Mr Grote certainly says—“Apollodorus connects this deluge with the wickedness of the brazen race in Hesiod, according to the practice general with the logographers of stringing together a sequence out of legends totally unconnected with each other.” One would have thought in one’s simplicity that if any two legends linked well together, uniting in common agreement with the scriptural account, it would be the legends of the Deluge and the brazen age.

[189] Let the significance of the following coincidence be considered in connection with the evidence at p. 244, Boulanger, “Ces fÊtes (Atheniasmes, ‘Anthisteries’) avoient pour objet une commÉmoration (of the Deluge) et l’on en attribuoit la fondation À Deucalion; elles Étoient aussi consacrÉes À Bacchus, ce qui les a fait nommÉs les anciennes ou les grandes Bacchanales.”—Comp. ch. xi. p. 244, also supra, 213.

[190] It is the fashion to deride Bryant’s etymology, and no doubt he did not write in the light of modern science; but I find (“Mythology,” iii. 534) that he had already given this information. “Main, from whence moenia, signified in the primitive language a stone, or stones, and also a building.”

[191] Mr Max MÜller, in his “Lectures on the Science of Language,” first series, says of “Man”:—“The Latin word ‘homo,’ the French ‘l’homme’ ... is derived from the same root, which we have in ‘humus,’ soil, ‘humilis,’ humble. Homo, therefore, would express the idea of being made of the dust of the earth.... There is a third name for man.... ‘Ma,’ in the Sanscrit, means to measure.... ‘Man,’ a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanscrit ‘Manu,’ originally thinker, then man. In the later Sanscrit we find derivations such as ‘MÂnava, MÂnasha, Manushya,’ all expressing man. In Gothic we find both ‘man,’ and ‘Maunisk,’ the modern German ‘maun,’ and ‘mensch.’ There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all things in ancient language.” As an instance of the correspondence of Old Egyptian and Welsh, Bunsen’s “Philosophy of Univ. Hist.,” i. 169, gives “Egyptian, ‘man’ = rockstone; Welsh, ‘maen;’ Irish, ‘main’ (coll. Latin, ‘moenia;’ Hebrew, ‘e-ben’).” And (p. 78) Bunsen says—“The divine Mannus, the ancestor of the Germans, is absolutely identical with Manus, who, according to ancient Indian mythology, is the God who created man anew after the Deluge, just as Deucalion did.”

[192] The Saturday Review, Nov. 14, 1868 (reviewing “The Indian Tribes of Guiana,” by the Rev. W. Brett), says of the Indian traditions:—“The ‘old people’s stories’ of the creation and the deluge are highly characteristic.... Under the rule of Sigu, son of Maikonaima, the tree of life was planted, in whose stem were pent up the whole of the waters which were to be let forth by measure to stock every river and lake with fish. Twarrika, the mischievous monkey, forced open the magic cover which kept down the waters, and the next minute was swept away with all things living by the bursting flood. The re-peopling of the world, as described by the Tamanacs of the Orinoco recalls the legend of Deucalion. One man and one woman took refuge on the mountain Tamanacu. They then threw over their heads the fruits of the Mauritia (or Ita) palm, from the kernel of which sprang men and women who once more peopled the earth.”

[193] “Essay on PrimÆval History.”

[194] “According to the calculations of Varro, the deluge of Ogyges occurred 400 years before Inachus, i.e. 1600 years before the first Olympiad, which would bring it to 2376 years before the Christian era; now, according to the Hebrew text, the Deluge of Noah took place 2349 B.C., which makes only a difference of 27 years. It is true that many other authors have reconciled these epochs.” Hesiod and Homer are silent on the subject of both Deucalion and Ogyges.... “It results from these considerations that the traditions of the ancient nations of the world confirm the narrative of Genesis, not only as to the existence, but even as to the epoch, of this catastrophe as fixed by Moses. Mersius (apud Gronovium, iv. 1023) cites more than twenty ancient authors who speak of Ogyges as appertaining in their eyes to what was most primitive in Greece. He is son of Neptune. He is the first founder of the kingdom of Thebes. Servius represents him as coming immediately after Saturn and the golden age [which directly connects Noah with Saturn, and the golden age with Noah]. Hesychius says of Ogyges that he represented all that was most ancient in Greece. That, indeed, passed into a proverb; they said, ‘old as Ogyges,’ as if they said, ‘old as Adam’” (Gainet, i. 229).

[195] In the same way we find “Mentuhotep,” or “Sesortasen I.” named, “when all other ancestors are omitted, as the sole connecting link between Amosis (xviii. dynasty) and Menes.” Vide Palmer’s “Egyptian Chronicles,” i. 385.

So, too, are Fohi (whom I believe to be Adam) and Shin-nong (Noah) connected and linked together in Chinese chronology. “I. Fohi the great Brilliant (Tai-hao), cultivation of astronomy and religion as well as writing. He reigned 110 years. Then came fifteen reigns. II. Shin-nong (divine husbandman). Institution of agriculture [compare ante, ch. x.] The knowledge of simples applied as the art of medicine.”—Bunsen’s “Egypt,” iii. 383, chap. on Chinese Chronology. Vide ante, 61; chap. on Tradition, p. 129; Prometheus.

[196] Kenrick (p. 37) says:—“The fact of traces of the action of water at a higher level in ancient times on these shores is unquestionable; under the name of raised beaches such phenomena are familiar to geologists on many coasts; but that the tradition (in Samothrace) was produced by speculation on its cause, not by an obscure recollection of its occurrence, is also clear; for it has been shown by physical proofs that a discharge of the waters of the Euxine (Black Sea) would not cause such a deluge as the tradition supposed” (Cuvier, Disc. sur les Revolutions du Globe, ed. 1826).

If these speculations were made at the commencement of Grecian history, and the speculations had reference to evidence of diluvian disruption along the highway by which they passed into Greece, should we not expect that theories of the violent rather than the gentler and gradual action of water would dominate in their geological tradition? Colonel George Greenwood, in “Rain and Rivers,” p. 2, says on the contrary—(“with reference to the theory that valleys are formed by ‘rain and rivers’”)—“There is, perhaps, no creed of man which, like this, can be traced up to the most remote antiquity, and traced down from the most remote antiquity to the present day. Lyell has himself quoted Pythagoras for it, through the medium of Ovid:—

But Pythagoras only enunciates the doctrine of Eastern antiquity; that is, of the Egyptians, the ChaldÆans, and the Hindoos. But since Pythagoras introduced this doctrine in the West, if it has ever slumbered, it has perpetually re-originated. Lyell shows that among the Greeks it was taught by Aristotle; among the Romans by Strabo; among the Saracens by Avicenna; in Italy by Moro, Geneselli, and Targioni; and in England by Ray, Hutton, and Playfair.”—Rain and Rivers, by Col. George Greenwood. Longmans, 1866. 2d edit.

[197] Gen. vi. 18; viii. 15; vi. 13; ix. 8; viii. 20; ix. 20; and Ecclesiasticus xliv. 1, 3, 4, 19, “The covenants of the world were made with Him.”

[198] I feel justified in bringing in attestation also the following verses of the “Oracula Sybillina,” for, as I have already said, even if they be forgeries of the second century A.D., they at any rate represent the tradition at that date (i. v. 270):—

Compare also the following verses (Orac. Sybil, i. 145) with the Vedic tradition (infra, p. 238) of the promise made to Satiavrata, and the Babylonian tradition respecting Hoa (infra):

[199] I only instance this as evidence that laws of some sort were attributed to Bacchus, whom the traditions also speak of as King of Asia: to judge of these laws by what we know of the Subazian mysteries, would be as if we were to form our opinion of the Mandan ceremonies (vide infra, ch. xi.) by the last day’s orgies only. In this matter we may say with Cicero, De Legibus, ii. 17—“Omnia tum perditorum civium scelere ... religionum jura polluta sunt.”

[200] Layard (“Nineveh and Babylon,” p. 343) says, “We can scarcely hesitate to identify this mythic form (at Kosyundik) with the Oannes or sacred man-fish, who, according to the traditions preserved by Berosus, issued from the ErethrÆan sea, instructed the ChaldÆans in all wisdom, in the sciences and the fine arts, and was afterwards worshipped as a god in the temples of Babylonia.... Five such monsters rose from the Persian Gulf at fabulous intervals of time (Cory’s “Fragments,” p. 30). It has been conjectured that this myth denotes the conquest of ChaldÆa at some remote and pre-historic period by a comparatively civilised nation coming in ships to the mouth of the Euphrates.... The Dagon of the Philistines and of the inhabitants of the Phoenician coast was worshipped, according to the united opinion of the Hebrew commentators on the Bible, under the same form.” The five apparitions at long intervals may have been the confusion of the previous revelations to the patriarchs with those made to Noah—or they may be reduplications (vide supra, p. 157).

[201] Dionysius Periegesis says the women of the British AmnitÆ celebrated the rites of Dionysos:—

[202] I would specially draw attention to the instances of temples constructed upon the model of ships, concerning which vide Bryant’s “Mythology,” ii. 221, 226, 227, 240; and compare with Plate XVIII. in MontfauÇon, ii.

[203] Compare Bryant.

[204] “O-kee-pa, a Religious Ceremony, and other Customs of the Mandans,” TrÜbner & Co. London, 1867. Mr Catlin’s statements are attested by the certificates of three educated and intelligent men who witnessed the ceremonies with him, and is further corroborated by a letter addressed to Mr Catlin by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, the celebrated traveller among the North American Indians, who had previously referred to them (he spent a winter among the Mandans).

[205] I read in the Times, March 6, 1871, that “The American papers state that workmen in Iowa, excavating for the projected Dubuque and Minnesota railroad, in the limestone at the foot of a bluff, discovered recently some caves and rock chambers, and, on raising a foot slab, a vault filled with human skeletons of unusual size, the largest being seven feet eight inches high. A figured sun on the walls is taken as indicating that the skeletons belonged to a people who worshipped that luminary [compare supra, p. 152] and the representation of a man with a dove stepping out of a boat, as an allusion to a tradition of the Deluge. The fingers of the largest skeleton clasped a pearl ornament, and traces of cloth were found crumbled at the feet of the remains. Many copper implements were found, and it is thought that the Lake Superior mines may have been worked at an early period. The remains were to be removed to the Iowa Institute of Arts and Sciences at Dubuque.”

[206] Compare account of Mandan tradition of the Creation, from “Hist. des Ceremonies Religieuses,” supra, p. 191.

[207] Supra, p. 35. These tortures have their exact counterpart in India, e.g. the ceremony of the Pota (compare Sanscrit, “pota” = boat), thus described by Hunter (“Rural Bengal,” 1868, p. 463):—“Pota (hook-swinging), now stopped by Government, but still practised (1865) among the Northern Santals [who have the distinct tradition of the Deluge and dispersion referred to, supra] in April or May. Lasted about one month. Young men used to swing with hooks through their back [as seen in Catlin’s illustrations], as in the Charak Puja of the Hindus. The swingers used to fast the day preceding and the day following the operation, and to sleep the intermediate night on thorns.”

“On pleuroit et l’on s’attristoit dans les fÊtes les plus gayes et plus dissolues; les cultes d’Isis et d’Osiris, ainsi que ceux de Bacchus, de CÉres, d’Adonis, d’Atys, &c., Étoient accompagnÉs de macÉrations et de larmes.”—Boulanger, iii. 355.

[208] Bryant (“Myth.” ii. 432) says, “There were many arkite” (i.e. commemorative of ark) “ceremonies in different parts of the world, which were generally styled Taurica sacra” (from taurus = bull). These mysteries were of old attended with acts of great cruelty. Of these “I have given instances, taken from different parts of the world; from Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily.”

[209] Let the following points of resemblance be noted also in the “PanathenÆa.” The lesser, and it is supposed the annual festival, was celebrated on the 20th of Thargelion, corresponding to the 5th May (compare Catlin). Every citizen contributed olive branches and an ox (vide Catlin) at the greater festival. “In the ceremonies without the city there was an engine built in the form of a ship, on purpose for this solemnity;” upon this the sacred garment of Minerva “was hung in the manner of a sail,” “the whole conveyed to the temple of Ceres Elusinia.” “This procession was led by old men, together, as some say, with old women carrying olive branches in their hands.” “After them came the men of full age with shields and spears, being attended by the ?et????? or sojourners, who carried little boats as a token of their being foreigners, and were called on that account boat-bearers; then followed the women attended by the sojourner’s wives, who were named ?d??af????, from bearing water pots.”—Compare Burton, Catlin. Then followed select virgins, covered with millet, “called basket-bearers,” the baskets containing necessaries for the celebration. “These virgins were attended by the sojourner’s daughters, who carried umbrellas (vide Pongol Festival, appendix), little seats, whence they were called seat-carriers.”—Compare Burton (vide Potter’s “Antiquities,” i. 419.)

Compare also the following in the “Dionysia” or festivals in honour of Bacchus (ante, p. 215) with Catlin. “They carried thyrsi, drums, pipes, flutes, and rattles, and crowned themselves with garlands of trees sacred to Bacchus, ivy, vine, &c. Some imitated Silenus, Pan, and the Satyrs, exposing themselves in comical dresses and antic motions;” and in this manner ran about the hills “invoking Bacchus.” “At Athens this frantic rout was followed by persons carrying certain sacred vessels, the first of which was filled with water.”

Bryant (“Mythology,” ii. 219) speaking of Egypt (“the priests of Ammon who at particular seasons used to carry in procession a boat,” concerning which refer to page 254), says—“Part of the ceremony in most of the ancient mysteries consisted in carrying about a kind of ship or boat, which custom upon due examination will be found to relate to nothing else but Noah and the Deluge.” He adds that the name of “the navicular shrines was Baris, which is very remarkable; for it is the very name of the mountain, according to Nicolaus Damascenus, on which the ark of Noah rested, the same as Ararat in Armenia.” Herodotus speaks of “Baris” as the Egyptian name of a ship, l. 2, 96; Eurip. “Iphig. in Aulis,” v. 297; Æschylus, PersÆ, 151; Lycophron, v. 747, refer to names of ships in connection with Noah. Sup., p. 196. Query—is our word barge a corruption of baris? or perhaps of baris in connection with “argus,” also a term for the ark. (With reference to this etymology vide my remark, p. 116, and d’Anselme, p. 196, and Bryant, ii. 251.)

[210] Compare the “Bhain-sasur” or buffalo-demon at Usayagiri, carrying a trident. Vide “The Bhilsa Tope,” Major Alex. Cunningham, 1854.

[211] It is as well to note, however, that the Dahomans have recently altered their customs. The one Captain Burton witnessed (ii. 34) was a “mixed custom,” and elsewhere allusion is made to “the new” ceremony.

[212] Analogies may perhaps be discovered in the representations of the procession escorting a relic casket on the architraves of the western gate at Sanchi. (Vide “The Bhilsa Tope,” by Major Alex. Cunningham, p. 227.)

“Street of a city on the left, houses on each side filled with spectators,... a few horsemen heading a procession, ... immediately outside the gate are four persons bearing either trophies or some peculiar instruments of office. Then follows a led horse, ... a soldier with a bell-shaped shield, two fifers, three drummers, and two men blowing conches. Next comes the king on an elephant, carrying the holy relic casket on his head and supporting it with his right hand. Then follows two peculiarly dressed men on horseback, perhaps prisoners. They wear a kind of cap (now only known in Barmawar, on the upper course of the Ravi) and boots or leggings. The procession is closed by two horsemen (one either the minister or a member of the royal family) and by an elephant with two riders.”

It may have had connection with the Aswarnedha or horse sacrifice (Cunningham, p. 363.) Boulanger (i. 109) says, “That after the winter solstice the ancient inhabitants of India descended with their king to the banks of the Indus; they there sacrificed horses and black bulls, signs of a funeral ceremony; they then threw a bushel measure into the water without their assigning any reason for it.” Compare the throwing the cakes into the gulf at Athens, and the hatchets into the water at the Mandan custom. Could it be that at the Dahoman ceremony the horses were redeemed because the wretched victims were substituted, carrying out the idea of vicarious sacrifice and expiation?

Sir John Lubbock (“Origin of Civilization,” p. 199) says, speaking of water worship, “The kelpie or spirit of the waters assumed various forms, those of a man, woman, horse, or bull being the most common.” Compare supra, pp. 196, 202, 204, Manou, Bacchus.

Homer (Hom. Il., Heynii, xxi. 130, Lord Derby, 145), says—

and (210) Asteropoeus is called “river-born,” because the son of Pelegon, who “to broadly flowing Axius owed his birth.” Remembering the belief of certain tribes of Indians (supra, p. 137) that they were “created under the water,” which I have construed to mean, that they were created on the other side of the Deluge, so we may take in a similar sense the traditions of these Homeric heroes that they were “river-born;” and does the expression, son of Pelegon (compare “son of Prometheus,” supra, p. 232), imply more than that he was the descendant of Phaleg, or, if not in the line of descent, the descendant of progenitors who had retained the tradition that Phaleg was so called, “because in his days the earth was divided”?—Gen. ch. x. 25. Compare ancient Welsh ballad (Davies’ “Mythology of British Druids,” p. 100)—

[213] The name for river in the Chitral or Little Kashghar vocabulary (Vigne, “Travels in Kashmir”) is river = sin; also in the Dangon, on the Indus, voc. (id.) river = sin; in the Affghan (Kalproth) the sea = sind. Sindhu is the Sanscrit name for river (Max MÜller, “Science of Lang.,” 1st series, 215); and has also its equivalent in ancient Persian. In Danish, river or lake = so; in Icelandic, sjor (sjo); in Bultistan, touh; German, see; English, sea; in Kashmir, sar = marse; Icelandic, saus. Compare Rivers Saar, Soane, Seine, Irish Suir; perhaps also Esk and Usk (Vigne, “Trav. in Kashmir”). Horse = shtah, in Bultistan. Has not so analogy with eau, augr (Chittral), water? Sara = water in Sanscrit (Max MÜller, “Chips,” ii. 47); Sanscrit, vari, more generic term for water; Latin, mare; Gothic, marie; Slavonic, more; Irish and Scotch, muir (id.) Compare Chinese “ma” = horse; Mongol, “mon” = horse; German, machre; English, mare. Conclusion, either there is the same word for horse and water in certain languages, which may have occurred in the way of secondary derivation from these “mysteries,” or if so means water, then “So-sin” may only be a reduplication, as in the names of some of our rivers—e.g. Dwfr-Dwy = water, of Deva = Dee-river (ArchÆol. Journal, xvii. 98). Bryant (“Myth.” ii. 408) says “The ?pp??, hippus (horse), alluded to in the early mythology was certainly a float or ship, the same as the ceto.” There is, moreover, the analogy in the Latin of aqua and equus. Another Sanscrit word for water, “ap” (Max MÜller, Sc. of L., 103) has analogy with the Greek ?pp?? = horse. It appears (Sc. of L., 2nd series, p. 36), that the Tahitians have substituted the word “pape” for “vai” = water; but both words “pape,” to ap, “vai,” to vari, seem to have analogies to Sanscrit as above. Plato (“Cratylus,” c. 36, Sc. of L., 1st series, p. 116) mentions that the name for water was the same in Phrygian and Greek. At p. 235, 1st series, Mr Max MÜller says that Persian HarÔya is the same as Sanscrit Saroya; which latter “is derived from a root ‘sar’ or ‘sri,’ to go, to run; from which ‘saras,’ water, ‘sarit,’ river, and ‘Sarayu,’ the proper name of the river near Oude.”

Here at any rate in the Sanskrit “sar,” to run, we may, if the above conjecture is rejected, start the words “horse” and “water” from a common root.

[214] Compare (Klaproth, “Mem. Asiat.” ii. 12)—Eng. ox; Mongol, char; Hebrew, chor; French, charrue (plough.) Klaproth, ii. 405, “Les cheveux en Thou Khin (whom he identifies with the Turks) portaient le nom de Sogo ou soko; cest le mÊme nom que le Turc sÂtch ou sadg.” Can it have affinity with Chinese sa (Chinese szu = boeuf sauvage); German, sÄen; Swedish, sÁ; French, semer; English = to sou; Peruvian, sara = maize; also French, coudre, to sow with English corn; Sanscrit, go; High German, chus; Sclavonic, gows (Max MÜller, “Chips,” ii. 27); and Kashmir and Dongan, gau; Icelandic, ku? In Affghan a bull = sakhendar and soukhandar. In the extinct Tartar Coman (vide Klaproth) ox = ogus or seger = Turkish, okus; Sanscrit, oukcha; German, ochse. Plough = Sanscrit, sinam; Irish, serak; Persian, siar. Horse = asp, Persian; ess, Sclavonic = English ass; and in Chittral on Indus (vide horse or bull used in ceremonies on banks of Indus, infra) horse = astor. (Has not tor here affinity with taureau.) Corn = Aslek (Kirghish) and Ashlyk (?) Turkish. Max MÜller (Science of Language, p. 231), says—“Aspa was the Persian name for horse, and in the Scythian names, Aspabota, Aspakara, and Asparatha, we can hardly fail to recognise the same element.” Also, p. 242, “The comparison of ploughing and sowing is of frequent occurrence in ancient language.” Eng., plough; Sclav., ploug = Sanscrit, plava, ship = Gk. p?????, ship. “In English dialects, plough is used as a waggon or conveyance. In the Vale of Blackmore, a waggon is called a plough, or plow, and Zull (A.-S., syl) is used for aratrum.”—Barnes, “Dorset Dialect,” p. 369, ap. Max MÜller.

[215] Compare the procession in the PanathenÆa and Dionysia, supra, p. 248.

[216] “Eight men representing eight buffalo bulls,” in Mandan celebration, “took their positions on the four sides of the ark or ‘big canoe.’”—Catlin, p. 17. “The chief actors in these strange scenes were eight men with skins of buffaloes,” &c. p. 16. Four images were suspended on poles above the mystery lodge, p. 8.

[217] In the Japanese (vide p. 269) version of the legend of the bull breaking the mundane egg (vide p.396), a gourd or pumpkin is also broken which contained the first man.—Vide Bryant’s “Mythology,” iii. 579. “I have mentioned that the ark was looked upon as the mother of mankind, and styled Da-Mater, and it was on this account figured under the semblance of a pomegranate,” “as it abounds with seed”—Bryant, ii. 380. Vide also plate (Bryant, ii. 410), where Juno (vide, p. 395) holds a dove in one hand and a pomegranate in the other.

[218] Compare alsosup., p. 210, with Saturn. “Ipsius autem canities,” &c., and “cum falce messis insigne.”

[219] Compare again these two figures, one figuring in the Dahoman procession, the other in the Mandan bull dance.

[220] I allude to the opening of the ceremony by the centenarian white man, “the first and only man.” Mr Catlin is of opinion that this incident was introduced and superadded by some missionaries, though he adds it would be still more strange if the (Jesuit) missionaries had instructed them “in the other modes.” This, however, is understating the case. It is conceivable that missionaries should have come among them, but in this case we should have expected some trace of Christian practices and dogmas; it is difficult to conjecture what set of missionaries could have indoctrinated them with the recondite pagan mysteries of Eleusis and Hierapolis.

[221] Vide also Giebel, “Tagesfragen,” p. 91; apud Reusch, p. 500.

[222] Vide “Cook’s Voyages,” i. 199; Prescott, ii. 476.

[223] “There have been recent instances of Japanese vessels having been thrown by shipwreck upon the coasts of the Sandwich Islands, and even on the mouth of the Columbia.”—Reusch, “La Bible et la Nature,” p. 499.

“Since the north-west coast of America and the north-east of Asia have been explored, little difficulty remains on this subject.... Small boats can safely pass the narrow strait. Ten degrees farther south, the Aleutian and Fox islands form a continuous chain between Kamschatka and the peninsula of Alaska in such a manner as to leave the passage across a matter of no difficulty.”—Warburton’s “Conquest of Canada,” i. 194.

Ellis (“Polynesian Researches,” ii. 46) says: “There are also many points of resemblance in language, manners, and customs between the South Sea Islanders and the inhabitants of Madagascar in the west; the inhabitants of the Aleutian and Kurile islands in the north, which stretch along the mouth of Behring’s Straits, and forms the chain which connects the old and new worlds,” &c.

[224] “The Sandwich Islands, with a population of 500,000, are more than two thousand miles from the coast of South America. How did the population of those islands get there? Certainly not in canoes over ocean waves of two thousand miles. But I am told ‘the Sandwich islanders are Polynesians;’ not a bit of it; they are two thousand miles north of the Polynesian group, with the same impossibility of canoe navigation, and are as different in physiological traits of character and language from the Polynesian, as they are different from the American races.—“Last Rambles” (Catlin), p. 317. 1868.

Captain King, “Transactions on returning to Sandwich Islands,” &c., continuation of Cook’s voyages, Pinkerton (xi. 730) says on the contrary: “The inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands are undoubtedly of the same race with those of New Zealand, the Society and Friendly Islands, Easter Islands, and the Marquesas. This fact, which, extraordinary as it is, might be thought sufficiently proved by the striking similarity of their manners and customs, and the general resemblance of their persons is established beyond all controversy by the absolute identity of their language.”

Shortland says that the New Zealanders, “when speaking of any old practice, regarding the origin of which you may inquire, have the expression constantly in their mouths, ‘E hara i te mea poka hou mai; no Hawaika mai ano.’—It is not a modern invention; but a practice brought from Hawaiki, Sandwich Islands).”—Shortland’s “Traditions of the New Zealanders,” p. 61.

[225] As far as I can ascertain, the pheasant is not a native of America. Yarrell speaks of it as Asiatic, and that it has been domesticated “in all parts of the old continent.” So also Gould. Of the American writers, neither Wilson, Audubon, Bonaparte, Nuttall, Richardson, or Jameson include the pheasant. Mr Catlin, however, says, p. 44: “From the translation of their name, already mentioned (Nu-mah-kÁ-kee, pheasants), an important inference may be drawn in support of the probability of their having formerly lived much farther to the south, as that bird does not exist on the prairies of the Upper Missouri, and is not to be met with short of the hoary forests of Ohio and Indiana, eighteen hundred miles south of the last residence of the Mandans. In their familiar name of Mandan, which is not an Indian word, there are equally singular and important features. In the first place, that they knew nothing of the name or how they got it; and next, that the word Mandan in the Welsh language [Mr C.’s theory is that they are the survivors of Prince Madoc’s expedition from Wales in the fourteenth century] means red dye, of which further mention will be made.” On the legend of the Welsh expedition, vide Warburton’s “Conquest of Canada,” ii., Appendix iv.

[226] “The Indians resemble the people of north-eastern Asia in form and feature more than any other of the human race; their population is most dense along the districts nearest to Asia; and among the Mexicans, whose records of the past deserve credence, there is a constant tradition that their Aztec and Toltec chiefs came from the north-west.”—Warburton’s “Conquest of Canada,” i. 195.

Brace (“Manual of Ethnology,” p. 115) says, after noting that whereas the prominence in the head “is anterior in the Chinese rather than lateral, as in the American Indians and the Tangusic tribes,” adds, “The peculiar distinguishing characteristics are the smallness of the eyes and the obliquity of the eyelids. The nose is usually small and depressed, though sometimes, in favourable physical conditions, natives are found with a slightly aquiline nose, giving the face a close resemblance to that of the American Indians or New Zealanders.”

Refer to argument at p. 70, with reference to the Mozca Indians.

[227] Compare what Ogilby (p. 36) says: “Near Firando (Japan) at an inlet of the sea stands an idol, being nothing but a chest of wood, about three feet high, standing like an altar [the big canoe was placed on end among the Mandans], whither women, when they suppose they have conceived, go in pilgrimage, offering on their knees rice or other presents.” At p. 136, at Jado, it is said, “somewhat farther stands a temple dedicated to all sorts of animals with a very high double roof.” (Query, Noah’s ark?)

In the Illustrated London News, January 13, 1872, its correspondent from Yokohama gives a short account of the Japanese religious festivals, in which among other coincidences I note the following: “The most absurd,” he says, “is one in which the foul fiend is simultaneously expelled from every house by dint of pelting him with boiled peas. The devil is chased out of the town with a dance of derision, by young fellows in grotesque costumes, for the public mirth.” Compare with the scene in the Mandan ceremonies, described by Catlin, vide supra, p. 260.

[228] Compare p. 448 in “Flint Chips,” (E. T. Stevens). “The Omahas possess a sacred shell, which is regarded as an object of great sanctity by the whole nation. It has been transmitted from generation to generation, and its origin is unknown. A skin lodge is appropriated to it, and in this lodge a man, appointed as a guard to the shell, constantly resides. It is placed upon a stand, and is never suffered to touch the earth. It is concealed from sight by a number of mats made of strips of skin plaited. The whole forms a large package, from which tobacco” (comp. Stevens’ “Flint Chips,” p. 315, and Catlin, supra) “and the roots of trees” (comp. supra, p. 155), “and other objects are suspended,” &c. &c.

[229] Vide Japanese tradition of the Deluge (Bertrand, “Dict. des Relig.,” Gainet, i. 208; also id.), it is said that the Japanese commemorate this event in their third annual festival, which takes place on the fifth day of the fifth month. Compare with Mandan’s, supra.

[230] Captain Cook, speaking of their dances (p. 115), says, “Between the dances of the women the men performed a kind of dramatic interlude, in which there was dialogue as well as dancing; but we were not sufficiently acquainted with their language to understand the subject. Some gentlemen saw a much more regular entertainment of the dramatic kind, which was divided into four acts.”

Vide Abbe Gainet, “La Bible sans la Bible,” i. 213, quotes l’Abbe Domenech, who speaks of “the dance of the Deluge among many nations of the north and west of America.” Gainet also says that there were two distinct traditions of the Deluge in the east and west groups of the Society Islands (Otaheite).

L’Abbe Gainet (i. 211) gives an account of the Mandans from “CeremonÍes Religieuses,” i. 7, which it will be interesting to compare with Catlin, as it was written a century previous to his visit. “The Mandans pretend that the Deluge was formerly raised up against them by the white men to destroy their ancestors.... Then the first man, whom they regard as one of their divinities, inspired mankind with the idea of constructing upon an eminence a town and fortress in wood, and promised them that the water should not pass that point. They followed his advice and constructed the ark on the banks of the Heart river. It was of a very large size, so that a part of their nation found safety there whilst the rest perished. In memory of this memorable event they place in each of their villages a small model of this edifice [which may account for the erect position of ‘the big canoe’], this model still exists. The waters abated after that, and to this day they celebrate, in memory of this ark, the fÊte of the ‘Okippe,’ which lasts four days.”

[231] Longmans, 1868, i. 290.

[232] Cardinal Wiseman in his letters to John Poynder, Esq. (“Essays on Various Subjects,” i. 257), says, “Dr Spencer, a learned divine of the Established Church, published two folio volumes replete with extraordinary erudition, entitled ‘De Legibus HebrÆorum ritualibus et eorum ratione,’ which has gone through many editions both here and on the Continent. Now, the entire drift and purport of this work is manifestly twofold—first, to prove that the great design of God, in giving rites and ceremonies to the Jews, was to prevent their falling into idolatry; secondly, to demonstrate that almost every practice, rite, ceremony, and act so given was directly borrowed from the Egyptian heathens; ... that whether we speak of the more solemn and especial injunctions, or of the minutest details of the ceremonial law, of circumcision and of sacrifice in all its varieties, and with all its distinctive ceremonies of purification and lustrations and new moons; of the ark of the covenant and the cherubim; of the temple and its oracles; of the Urim and Thummim, and the emissary goat; of them all Spencer has endeavoured to prove, and that to the satisfaction of many learned men, that they pre-existed among the Egyptians and other neighbouring nations.”

I have not met with Dr Spencer’s work. I may mention, however, the pomegranates in the Levitical robe as an instance. Vide references in this chapter and appendix.

[233] Much doubt has been expressed as to the veracity of M. Guinnard’s narrative, but the scenes and customs referred to are not likely to have been invented; and on the supposition of a fictitious narrative (although I see nothing incredible) they will probably have been imported from true narratives of other tribes. In either case they supply additional evidence.

[234] I need not remind my reader that these speculations of De Maistre anticipated by many years the analogous, though at the same time independent, conclusions of Archbishop Whately, in his lecture “On the Origin of Civilisation,” published in 1854.

[235] “We ought then to recognise that the state of civilisation and of science is, in a certain sense, the natural and primitive state of man. Thus, all oriental traditions commenced with a state of perfection and light, and, I repeat it, of supernatural light; and Greece—lying Greece, which ‘has dared everything in history’—renders homage to this truth, in placing its Golden Age at the beginning of things. It is no less remarkable that it does not attribute to the following ages, even to the iron age, the state of savagery, so that all that it has told us of those primitive men living on acorns, &c., puts it in contradiction with itself, and can only have reference to particular cases, i.e. to some races degraded, and then reclaimed to a state of nature, which is a state of civilisation.”—De Maistre’s “SoirÉes de St Petersbourg” i. Deux: Entretien, p. 98.

[236] I consider that this remark has been fully substantiated in Marshall’s “Christian Missions.”

[237] Compare with Gainet, i. 92, 93.

[238] “Now it is clear that the train of thought which leads from purification to penance, or from purification to punishment, reveals a moral and even a religious sentiment in the conception and naming of poena, and it shows us that in the very infancy of criminal justice punishment was looked upon (Mr Max MÜller is speaking with reference to what I may call briefly the Sanscrit epoch) not simply a retribution or revenge, but as a correction, as a removal of guilt. We do not feel the presence of these early thoughts when we speak of corporal punishment or castigation; yet castigation too was originally chastening, from ‘castus,’ pure; and ‘incestum’ was impurity or sin, which, according to Roman law, the priests had to make good, or to punish by a ‘supplicium,’ or supplication or prostration before the gods.”

[239] Compare with Max MÜller, “Chips,” ii. 256.

[240] Vide chapter on Savage Life in “Pre-historic Times.”

[241] It may perhaps be doubtful to what extent Sir J. Lubbock maintains his theory of a Stone Age; although Sir John formally excludes China and Japan from the argument, he nevertheless appears to me to assume the existence of universal transitional periods through which the human race necessarily passed. “It would appear that pre-historic archÆology may be divided into four great epochs. Firstly, that of the Drift: when man shared the possession of Europe with the mammoth, &c. This we may call the ‘palÆolithic period.’ Secondly, the later or polished Stone Age; a period, &c. Thirdly, the Bronze Age, &c. Fourthly, the Iron Age.” Sir John adds, certainly—“In order to prevent misapprehension, it may be well to state at once, that for the present I only apply this classification to Europe, though in all probability it might be extended also to the neighbouring parts of Asia and Africa. As regards other civilised countries, China and Japan for instance, we as yet know nothing of their pre-historic archÆology. [I should rather say, as we as yet have no reason to suppose that they have ever lost the knowledge of metals.] It is evident also that some nations, such as the Fuegians, Andamaners, &c., are even now only in an age of stone. But even in this limited sense, the above classification has not met with general acceptance; there are still some archÆologists who believe that the arms and implements—stone, bronze, and iron—were used contemporaneously.”—Pre-historic Times, pp. 2, 3. I think that the concluding sentence makes it quite clear that Sir John assumes the existence of universal progressive periods as above. In any case it may be proved in this way. Sir John argues upon the hypothesis of the unity of the human race; and I also think that he will not refuse the unbroken testimony to the fact of the civilisation of Europe from Asia. Either, then, the first colonisation took place when Asia was in the state of the “Drift,” or in the “later polished Stone Age,” or else the migration left Asia with the knowledge of bronze or iron. On the latter supposition the argument I contend for is conceded, and original civilisation and subsequent degeneracy is established. To escape this alternative the universality of a Stone Age in Asia as well as in Europe, must be proved or assumed. This assumption I maintain is essential to Sir John’s argument.

[242] Wilson (“ArchÆologia of Scotland,” 360) says, “But after all it is to Asia we are forced to return for the true source of nearly all our primitive arts, nor will the canons of archÆology be established on a safe foundation till the antiquities of that older continent have been explored and classified.” Not only bronze but iron has been found in the East in use at an early period (vide Layard, “Nineveh and Babylon,” 178–9, 194). At Nimroud, Dr Percy (id. 670) says the iron was used to economise the bronze; if so it must have been cheaper, and therefore probably more abundant; and he is of opinion that “iron was more extensively used by the ancients than seems to be generally admitted.” Philology seems also to establish an early common knowledge, and subsequent tradition of the use of metals. Mr Max MÜller (ii. 45) says, “That the value and usefulness of some of the metals was known before the separation of the Aryan race can be proved only by a few words; for the names of most of the metals differ in different countries. Yet there can be no doubt that iron was known, and its value appreciated, whether for defence or attack. Whatever its old Aryan name may have been, it is clear that Sanscrit ‘ayas,’ Latin ‘ahes,’ in ‘ahencus’ and even the contracted form ‘Æs, Æris’; the Gothic ‘ais,’ the old German ‘er,’ and the English iron, are names cast in the same mould, and only slightly corroded even now by the rust of so many centuries.” The Swedish Gothic race had no tradition but of weapons of iron. (Professor Nillson’s “Stone Age,” p. 192.) I find in Captain Cook’s Voyages that in Otaheite their word for iron is “eure-eure.” Germans (apud Tacitus) called their iron lances “framea,” which has great resemblance to ferrum. (Vide Wilson, 195.) The following passage from Wilson’s “ArchÆologia” seems to prove this common terminology still more extensively—“The Saxon ‘gold’ differs not more essentially from the Greek ‘???s??’ than from the Latin ‘aurum’; iron from ‘s?de???’ or ‘ferrum’; but when we come to examine the Celtic names of the metals it is otherwise. The Celtic terms are: Gold: Gael, ‘or,’ golden, ‘orail’; Welsh, ‘aur’; Latin, ‘ aurum.’ Silver: Gael, ‘airgiod,’ made of silver, ‘airgiodach’; Welsh, ‘ariant’; Latin, ‘argentum’—derived in the Celtic from ‘arg,’ white, or milk, like the Greek ‘?????,’ whence they also formed their ‘???????.’ Now, is it improbable that the Latin ‘ferrum’ and the English ‘iron’ spring indirectly from the same Celtic root? Gael, ‘iarunn’; Welsh, ‘haiarn’; Saxon, iron; Danish, ‘iern’; Spanish, ‘hierro,’ which last furnishes no remote approximation to ‘ferrum.’ Nor with the older metals is it greatly different, as bronze, Gael, ‘umha’ or ‘prais’; Welsh, ‘pres,’ whence our English ‘brass,’ a name bearing no very indistinct resemblance to the Roman ‘Æs.’ Lead in like manner has its peculiar Gaelic name ‘luaidha,’ like the Saxon ‘lÆd’ (lead), while the Welsh ‘plwm’ closely approximates to the Latin ‘plumbum.’ It may undoubtedly be argued that the Latin is the root instead of the offshoot of these Celtic names, but the entire archÆological proofs are opposed to this idea,” p. 350.

Sir J. Lubbock, “Pre-historic Times” (p. 372) says, “The tools of the Tahitians when first discovered were made of stone, bone, shell, or wood. Of metal they had no idea. When they first obtained nails they mistook them for the young shoots of some very hard wood, and hoping that life might not be quite extinct, planted a number of them carefully in their gardens.”

Captain Wallis, however, speaking of the islands within the Polynesian group, remarks “as an extraordinary circumstance that although no sort of metal was seen on any of the lately discovered islands, yet the nations were no sooner possessed of a piece of iron, than they began to sharpen it, but did not treat copper or brass in the same manner.”—“Voyages of English Navigators round the World,” iii. 108.

Would not these different appreciations of iron and brass be accounted for if we suppose iron to be the last metal they had been traditionally acquainted with? iron being the more common and inexpensive metal.

[243] “Mr Vaux of the British Museum has added the following interesting note on the metallurgy of the ancients. 1st, The earliest form of metal work appears to have been employed in the ornamentation of sacred vessels for temples, &c.... Occasionally the floor or foundation of some temples was of brass: thus ?a??e?? ??d?? (Soph. Œd. Col.), perhaps like the room at Delphi called ?a???? ??d??, itself also a treasury.”—Layard, “Nineveh and Babylon,” p. 673.

Boulanger, “L’antiquitÉ dÉvoilÉe par ses usage,” (iii. 359), says, “Ce sont les mystÈres qui out tirÉ les hommes de la vie sauvage pour les ramener À la vie sociale et policÉe. Ces mystÈres Étoient un composÉ de cÉrÉmonies religieuses ... leur origine remonte au temps des hÉros et des demi-dieux.”

[244] “Of all the different phases of civilisation, those which a nation must pass before it attains the highest grade of development, the first rude state is the most enduring and the most difficult to get over.”—Professor Nillson’s “Stone Age,” 191.

“The evidence of the transition from a stone to a bronze age among the Egyptians appears merely to be the use of a stone knife found in their catacombs, and used for the sacred incision into the dead, although they used bronze and iron knives for ordinary purposes, and whereas the stone knife was used by the early Hebrews in circumcision, and by the priests of Montezuma as instruments of human sacrifice.”—Wilson’s “ArchÆologia,” p. 29.

[245] It amounts to this, that we are requested first of all to discard and absolutely exclude all that we do know through direct historical evidence of our origin, and to determine it merely by scientific induction.

Sir J. Lubbock says in his introduction to Professor Nillson’s “Stone Age” (which is a summary of the whole question), “I have purposely avoided all reference to history, all use of historical data, because I have been particularly anxious to show that in archÆology we can arrive at definite and satisfactory conclusions, on independent grounds, without any assistance from history; consequently regarding times before writing was invented, and therefore before written history had commenced” (p. xlii.) Compare with supra, ch. vii.

[246] “It must not be forgot to the honour of the Babylonians that they are acknowledged, by all antiquity, to have been the first who made use of writing in their public and judicial acts, but at what period it is not known.”—Goguet, “Origin of Laws,” i. 45.

Diodorus, however, says of the Egyptians (vide p. 48), “Menes without doubt has been esteemed the first legislator of Egypt, because he was the first who put his laws in writing. For before him Vulcan, Helius, and Osiris (vide ante, p. 189) had given laws to Egypt.”—Diod. l. 1, 17–18.

But also it must be recollected that the copper mines of Egypt were worked from the earliest period.

[247] But there are savages and savages; or rather there are savages who are strictly such, and savages who have still the germ of life and who are more properly distinguished as barbarians. Vide ante, p. 285, De Maistre’s definition of the barbarian.

[248] I find curious testimony to the belief in M. Maupertius’ (Pinkerton, i. 252–4) account of an expedition of thirty leagues which he was induced to make into the interior of Lapland, by the accounts which he had received of a monument which the Laplanders “looked upon as the wonder of their country, and in which they conceived was contained the knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant.” In the end a monument was found bearing on it the appearance of great antiquity, and an inscription which M. Celsius, his companion (“very well acquainted with the Runic”), could not read. M. Maupertius indeed says, “If the tradition of the country be consulted, all the Laplanders assure us that they are characters of great antiquity, containing valuable secrets; but what can one believe in regard to antiquity from those people who do not even know their own age, and who for the greater part are ignorant who were their mothers.” Without supposing that the mysterious stone actually concealed any valuable and recondite knowledge, I am still struck by this attestation to the belief that antiquity shrouded such secrets; and if, which does not altogether accord with other accounts, the Lapps are as ignorant as they are here represented, then it would seem to be true that when mankind lose the knowledge of everything else, they still retain the tradition of their loss and the knowledge of their degradation. Concerning the superstitious veneration for stone arrow-heads very generally diffused, vide Mr E. T. Stevens’ “Flint Chips” (Salisbury, 1870, p. 89.)

[249] Vide Sir George Grey’s “Polynesian Mythology,” p. xiii.; F. A. Weld’s (Governor of Western Australia) “Notes on New Zealand,” pp. 15, 60.

[250] This was a recognition on Tasman’s part that there was a violation of the law of nations, which he evidently considered ought to have been recognised by these people. For killing unarmed men he does not stigmatise them as savages, but as murderers, which name has clung to the spot and to the transaction to this day.

[251] I am aware that what I have opposed to Sir J. Lubbock is only the contrary and not the contradictory of his proposition. I find, however, that a very competent authority, Wilson, “ArchÆology and Pre-historic Annals of Scotland,” p. 42, says: “No people, however rude or debased be their state, have yet been met with so degraded to the level of the brutes as to entertain no notion of a Supreme Being, or no anticipation of a future state.” “All polytheism is based on monotheism; idolatry implies religious feeling.”—Bunsen’s Egypt, iv. 69. But in truth it was not a priest or a missionary who first enunciated the contradictory of Sir John Lubbock’s proposition—it was Cicero. “Itaque ex tot generibus nullum est animal, prÆter hominem, quod habeat notitiam aliquam dei: ipsisque in hominibus nulla gens est, neque tam immansueta, neque tam fera, quÆ non etiam si ignoret qualem habere deum deceat, tamen habendum sciat.” De Legibus; i. 8.

[252] I should not have considered it necessary to have entered so elaborately into this argument, if I had previously read the chapter on Animism in Mr Tylor’s “Primitive Culture.” The instances, however, which follow will stand as supplementary.

[253] Sir J. Lubbock says (p. 370) of the Feegee islanders: “They did not worship idols, but many of the priests seem to have really thought that they had been in actual communication with the Atona; and some of the early missionaries were inclined to believe that Satan may have been permitted to practise a deception upon them, in order to strengthen his power. However extraordinary this may appear, the same was the case in Tahiti.”

[254] After all, is there not something in their mode of prayer which recalls the language of Psalm cxl., “Dirigatur oratio mea sicut incensum in conspectu tuo: elevatio manuum mearum sacrificium vespertinum.”

If the reader will refer to Bunsen’s “Egypt,” &c. vol. i. p. 497, he will find “a man with uplifted arms” as the ideographic sign (19) for “to praise, glorification,” which is in evidence not only that it was the natural but the traditional mode.

[255] Garcilasso de la Vega’s authority is so unimpeachable, and at the same time his testimony is so unmistakable on this point, that it will be as well to give his own words, as he was well acquainted with the Peruvian traditions, through his mother, who was one of the Yncas. He adds: “When the Indians were asked who Pachacamac was, they replied that he it was who gave life to the universe, and supported it; but that they knew him not, for they had never seen him, and that for this reason they did not build temples to him, nor offer him sacrifices; but that they worshipped him in their hearts (mentally), and considered him to be an unknown God.... From this it is clear, that these Indians considered him to be the maker of all things.” Hakluyt ed. of Garcil. de la Vega’s “Royal Commentaries of the Yncas,” ed. C. Markham, 1869, i. 107. He further remarks that, whereas they hesitated to pronounce the name of Pachacamac, “they spoke of the sun on every occasion.”

Compare the accounts we have of the Guanches. M. Pegot Ogier, “The Fortunate Isles” (Canaries), 1871, says (p. 283), that a comparison of the Chronicles of the Conquest shows that, “far from being idolaters, the Guanches worshipped one God, the Creator and Preserver of the world,” and that (p. 282), “in their worship, they raised their hands to heaven, and sacrificed on the mountains by pouring milk on the ground from a height; their milk was carried in a sacred vase called ganigo.” The name of their god, “Achoron Achaman” = “He who upholds the heaven and earth,” and “Achuhuyahan Achuhucanac” = “He who sustains every one,” has resemblances with “Pachacamac” = “Pacha,” the earth; and “camac” participle of “camani,” “I create.”—(C. Markham, Hakluyt ed. of Garcil. de la Vega, i. 101.)

[256] Compare with pp. 156, 214.

[257] Compare the following passage in the Bishop of Chalons’ “Le Monde et l’Homme Primitif” (with reference to Gen. i.—the Creation). At p. 11 the Bishop says, “That when the Book of the Law of Manou and the Mahabarata relate that God, who contains within Himself his own principle in the first instance, the water, and gave it fecundity, and that the produce of this fecundity became an egg, ... can we see in this anything else than the fantastic translation of this phrase of Scripture, ‘L’esprit de Dieu couvait la surface des eaux—Rouha Elohim meharephet hal pene hammaÏm.’” Vide also p. 11 (as to universality of tradition) and p. 34 as to text also. J. G. Vance (“ArchÆol.” xix.) says, upon the mundane egg “the whole system of ancient religion was based” (J. B. Waring, “Stone Monuments of Remote Ages,” p. 5, 1870).

[258] I find, in ArchÆological Journal, No. 89, 1866, p. 27, that corpses in a sitting posture were found under the long cromlechs in South Jutland.

[259] Vide Dr Newman’s “Grammar of Assent,” p. 386, et seq.

[260] Per contra, I invite Sir J. Lubbock’s attention to the following passage from Mr Gladstone’s “Homer” (ii. 44), “As the derivative idea of sin depended upon that of goodness, and as the shadow ceases to be visible when the object shadowed has become more dim, we might well expect that the contraction and obscuration of the true idea of goodness would bring about a more than proportionate loss of knowledge concerning the true nature of evil. The impersonation of evil could only be upheld in a lively or effectual manner as the opposite of the impersonation of good; and when the moral standard of Godhead had so greatly degenerated, as we find to be the case even in the works of Homer, the negation of that standard could not but cease to be either interesting or intelligible. Accordingly we find that the process of disintegration, followed by that of arbitrary reassortment and combination of elements, had proceeded to a more advanced stage with respect to the tradition of the evil one than in the other cases.”

[261] Sir J. Lubbock (“Pre-historic Times,” p. 337) says, “The largest erection in Tahiti was constructed by the generation living at the time of Captain Cook’s visit, and the practice of cannibalism had been recently abandoned.” For these statements he refers to Forster, “Observations made during a Voyage round the World,” p. 327, a work I have not at hand, and also Ellis, “Polynesian Researches,” ii. p. 29. I have made the reference to the latter, but I do not find a syllable about cannibalism; and as to the other point Ellis says, “In the bottom of every valley, even to the recesses in the mountains ... stone pavements of their dwellings and courtyards, foundations of houses and ruins of family temples, are numerous.... All these relics are of the same kind as those observed among the nations at the time of their discovery, evidently proving that they belong to the same race, though to a more populous era of their history.” I draw attention to this inadvertence, as the above instances (two) are the most important of the four which Sir J. Lubbock adduces in support of his view. Vide Appendix.

[262] The Duke of Argyll, balancing the conclusions of Archbishop Whately and Sir J. Lubbock (“Primeval Man,” p. 139), says, “Whately defies the supporter of Development to produce a single case of savages having raised themselves. Sir J. Lubbock replies by defying his opponent to show that it has not been done and done often. He urges, and urges as it seems to me with truth, that the great difficulty of teaching many savages the arts of civilised life, is no proof whatever that the various degrees of advance towards the knowledge of those arts which are actually found among semi-barbarous nations may not have been of strictly indigenous growth. Thus it appears that one tribe of red Indians called Mandans practised the art of fortifying their towns. Surrounding tribes, although they saw the advantage derived from this art, yet never practised it, and never learned it.” So far as to the fact. The Duke of Argyll continues the argument on the side of Sir J. Lubbock. But what I wish to indicate is that this crucial instance of the Mandans may be triumphantly adduced in support of my proposition. Why, these are the very Mandans among whom Catlin and the Prince Maxmilian of Neuwied discovered the curious commemorative ceremony of the Deluge! Vide ch. xi.

[263] Since writing the above, I have referred to Wallis and Bougainville. Wallis could not discover “that these people had any kind of religious worship among them.” Bougainville says “that their principal deity is called ‘Ein-t-era,’ i.e. ‘king of light’ or ‘of the sun’; besides whom they acknowledge a number of inferior divinities, some of whom produce evil and others good; that the general name for these ministering spirits is Eatona; and that the natives suppose two of these divinities attend each affair of consequence in human life, determining its fate either advantageously or otherwise. To one circumstance our author speaks in decisive terms. He says, when the moon exhibits a certain aspect which bears the name of ‘Malama Tamai’ (the moon is in a state of war), the natives offer up human sacrifices.... When any one sneezes, his companions cry out ‘Eva-rona-t-eatona,’ i.e. ‘May the good genius awaken thee,’ or ‘May not the evil genius lull thee asleep.’”

Captain King (“Journal of Transactions on returning to the Sandwich Islands,” &c., Pinkerton, xi. 737) says of the Sandwich Islanders, “The religion of these people resembles in most of its principal features that of the Society and Friendly Islands. Their morais, their whattas, their idols, their sacrifices, and their sacred songs, all of which they have in common with each other, are convincing proofs that their religious notions are derived from the same source.”

[264] The “Popul Vul” (pp. 223–227, Paris, 1861, vide Baring Gould, “Origin and Development of Religious Belief,” p. 383) gives an instance—or embodies a reminiscence—of a people who had lost the tradition of fire.

“Then arrived the tribes perishing with cold, ... and all the tribes were gathered, shivering and quaking with cold, when they came before the leaders of the Iniches.... Great was their misery. ‘Will you not compassionate us,’ they asked; ‘we ask only a little fire. Were we not all one, and with one country, when we were first created? Have pity on us.’ ‘What will you give us that we should compassionate you,’ was the answer made to them.... It was answered, ‘We will inquire of Tohil’” (their fire-god); and then follows the horrible condition of human sacrifices to be offered to their fire-god Tohil, with reference to which Mr B. Gould quotes it. Vide supra, p. 81, tradition among the Sioux Indians, of fire having been sent to them from heaven after the Deluge.

In Colden’s “Five Indian Nations,” p. 167, I find an Indian chief says: “Now before the Christians arrived, the general council of the Five Nations was held at Onondaga, where there has from the Beginning a continual fire been kept burning; it is made of two great logs, whose fire never extinguishes.”

[265] I find, in Falkner’s “Description of Patagonia,” &c., 1774 (Falkner resided near 40° 7' in those parts), “that in the vocabulary of the Moluches, although the word for ‘fire’ is ‘k’tal,’ the word for ‘hot’ is ‘asee,’ ‘cold’ ‘chosea.’”

But Sir J. Lubbock admits “asi” is the same word as “ahi,” and if “ahi” denotes light and heat, it also signifies fire.

Should we not expect, at least ought it to cause surprise, that the word for “fire,” where poverty of language may be presumed, should stand also for light and heat? In the Andaman vocabulary (Earl’s “Papuans”) “ahay” is their word for the sun—in which the two senses seem to combine. In Shortland’s “Comp. Table of Polynesian Dialects” (Traditions of the New Zealanders"), I find ahi means fire, and not light.

[C] And as would appear from Shortland (id. pp. 55, 56, “ao,” a seemingly cognate though not identical word with “ahi,” is the New Zealand word for light. But in Bougainville’s “Vocabulary of Faiti (Otaheite) Island,” I find again “eaÏ,” i.e. their word for fire, whereas their word for light, not darkness, is “EouramaÏ” and “Po” = day light), whilst they have a distinct word for “hot” = “Ivera”—“Era” being the sun. Compare Sanscrit “aghni” = ignis, fire.—Vide Card. Wiseman, “Science and Revealed Religion,” p. 40, 5th ed.

[266] The works of Garcilasso de la Vega, Valera, P. de Cieza, and De Sahagun must be excepted. As an instance of the neglect which we have reason to regret, the former gives an account of one only (the Raymi) of the four annual festivals of the Peruvians.—Hakluyt Soc. ed. ii. 155. He gives the name, however, of another—namely, the Situa.

[267] Probably a tradition of the penitence of Adam.

[268] Here, the admixture of sun-worship, as identifying the mythology at any rate with the Hamitic and “Cuthite,” directly militates in favour of my view against the conjecture that Manco Capac was a missionary.

[269] Vide also the like confused tradition of Nimrod (Assyria) and Menes (Egypt), Bunsen, p. 192.

[270] If an identity has been established between Quetzalcohuatl and Manco Capac (vide Prescott “Conquest of Peru,” i. 9), it will appear that this legislator, who shut his ears when he was spoken to of war, did nevertheless leave them admirable maxims (compare with Indian (Aryan) maxims, p. 400) and laws of war, e.g. Prescott, “Peru,” p. 69. Compare extract from Davies—vide supra, preface.

“The Peruvian soldier was forbidden to commit any trespass on the property of the inhabitants whose territory lay in the line of march. From the moment war was proclaimed,” &c., “in every stage of the war he was open to propositions for peace, and although he sought to reduce his enemies by carrying off their harvests and destressing them by famine, the Peruvian monarch allowed his troops to commit no unnecessary outrage on person or property.” It is not to the point that these rules were not always observed.

[271] Compare supra, p. 201, note to Manou (Bacchus).

[272] Compare with Gen. vi. 18, viii. 15, “And God spoke to Noe, saying”; also vi. 13, ix. 8; and Gen. viii. 20—“And Noe built an altar unto the Lord, and taking of all cattle”; and ix. 20—“And Noe, a husbandman, began to till the ground, and planted a vineyard.” Also Ecclesiasticus xliv. 1, 3, 4, 19, “The covenants of the world were made with him.” Compare also with the “Oracula Sybillina,” supra, p. 237.

[273] It may be well here to recall to recollection the well-known lines of Virgil—

[274] Boulanger (“L’AntiquitÉ DevoilÉe,” i. 10), recognises, although it perplexes him, the tradition which places the gold and silver age after the Deluge—“À la suite de cet Évenement, les traditions de l’age d’or, et du regne des Dieux paroissent encore plus bizarres;” also id. iii. 338; also 308. Also 328, “Ce n’est donc point un État politique qu’il faut chercher dans l’age d’or, ce fut un État tout religieux. Chaque famille pÉnÉtrÉe des jugemens d’en haut, vecut quelque temps sous la conduite des pÈres qui rassembloient leurs enfans.” It is thus that Seneca depicts the golden age. Vide p. 231.

[275] It might be a sufficient answer to say that they did not operate because a miraculous intervention ordained it otherwise; but if we seek the explanation in natural causes they will be found such as will exactly confirm the theory. The causes which lead to dispersion are the necessities of the pastoral life. If there, then, was no dispersion, the conclusion is that during the three or four centuries after the Deluge mankind were mainly engaged in husbandry—“and Noe, a husbandman, began to till the ground.” But husbandry is the first and essential condition of civilisation. We have seen that Mr Mill, Mr Hepworth Dixon, &c., believe that mankind slowly arrived at this stage through the intermediate stages of shepherd and hunter. On the contrary it would appear that they started in this career. Again, given the conditions which Genesis describes—families living in patriarchal subjection to a chief who had the knowledge of husbandry—cultivation would be the natural consequence; for the one and only hindrance to cultivation, supposing the knowledge, is insecurity. “Most critical of all are the causes which conduce to agriculture, agriculture at once the most fruitful and the most dangerous expedients for life. He who tills the soil exposes his valuable stores to the malice or enmity of the whole world. Any marauder,” &c. (“Miscell.” by Francis W. Newman, 1869). But as the conditions described in Genesis exclude the probability of such interruption—agriculture would have been the preferable resource of life—and so it would have continued until circumstances led to the extension of the pastoral mode. So far, then, as we are brought to regard the different modes of life as progressive or successive (I believe that even at this early stage they were contemporaneous), the order of the succession according to the theory now in vogue must be reversed; and we must regard mankind as first a community of husbandmen, gradually extending themselves as shepherds, to be finally still more dispersed in some of their branches as hunters.

[276] “And truly there is a sap in nations as well as in trees, a vigorous inward power, ever tending upwards, drawing its freshest energies from the simplest institutions, and the purest virtues and the healthiest moral action.... And if of nations we may so speak, what shall we say of the entire human race, when all its energies were, in a manner, pent up in its early and few progenitors; when the children of Noah, removed but a few generations from the recollections and lessons of Eden, and possessing the accumulated wisdom of long-lived patriarchs, were marvellously fitted to receive those strange and novel impressions, which a world, just burst forth in all its newness, was calculated to make?”—Card. Wiseman, “Science and Revealed Religion,” Lect. ii.

It is to this period that I am inclined to refer the belief in an age of high chivalry and virtue, with subsequent degeneracy, widely diffused in the legends of King Arthur. I will surrender my opinion whenever the historical information respecting that monarch shall have been more exactly determined.

[277] “The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards and puts back the bolt.”—Gladstone, “Homer and the Homeric Age,” ii. 30.

[278] Plato’s testimony to this tradition is remarkable (Plato de Legibus, lib. i.) Boulanger extracts the passage with reference to the golden age (iii. 296). (Vide also Grote’s Plato, iii. 337.) Plato says—“That it is a tradition that there was formerly a great destruction of mankind caused by inundations and other general calamities [are not these calamities those to which Horace alludes, I. Ode iii.,

from which only a few escaped?] those who were spared led a pastoral life on the mountains. We may suppose,” he adds, “that these men possessed the knowledge of some useful arts, of some usages to which they had previously conformed.” Plato indeed goes on to tell how this knowledge must have been lost, and one reason he gives is, “mankind remained many centuries on the summits of the highest mountains—fear and remembrance of the past did not permit them to descend into the plains.” Strabo (apud Boulanger, iii. 301) also discusses this question. He says that mankind descended into the plains at different periods according to their courage and sociability (lib. xiii.) Varro (De re Rustica, lib. xiii. cap. i.) says they were a long time before they descended.” Now, in these passages from Plato, Strabo, and Varro, there is distinct testimony to the fact of mankind remaining on the mountains after the Deluge, and their subsequent inferences are drawn from the fact that they supposed them to have remained there a long time. Is not this merely that they have recorded one tradition to the exclusion of another—viz., that mankind were brought into the plains by Saturn, in accordance with the indications in Genesis ix. 20, “and Noe, a husbandman began to till the ground.” Compare supra, p. 137, and p. 212; Bryant, “Mythology,” iii. p. 22, following [St] Epiphanius, says the descendants of Noah remained 659 years in the vicinity of Ararat—i.e. five generations.

[279] With reference to the stone age, vide p. 288.

[280] Concerning the evident tradition of the dispersion in Hesiod, “Theog.” v. 836, vide Bryant’s “Mythology,” iii. 51, et seq.

[281] This appears to me to be borne out by the Sanscrit root “ar, to plough,” being seemingly cognate with “Æs, Æris,” and with the produce corn = “arista,” aroum, aratrum, Greek ??s?a, &c.

Sanscrit, “ar, to plough,” vide note 1 in Brace’s “Ethnology.” Vide also Max MÜller, “Science of Language,” id. Vide also Max MÜller, “Chips,” ii. p. 45.

“The name of the plough (in Egypt) was ?H??, ploughed land, appears to have been a?t, a word still traced in the Arabic ‘hart,’ which has the same import; and the Greek ???t??? and Roman aratrum appears to indicate, like the a????a, an Egyptian origin.”—Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, i. 45.

If “ar,” as in “a??st??,” should be proposed as the primitive root, it must be after rejection of the evidence of secondary derivation; but does not our common parlance still run to the comparison of virtues with metals, “good as gold,” “hard as iron,” “true as steel.” Why then at a later period should not brass have become the expression for best in the brazen or warlike age, when courage was the virtue principally regarded? If this is accepted, “????,” or Mars, so far from being the root, would be a tertiary derivation—the embodiment and deification of what was regarded as best in the brazen age. Gladstone (“Homer,” ii. p. 225), shows that Mars was a deity of late invention, and not one of the traditionary deities. Rawlinson, vide supra, p. 164, identifying Ares with Nimrod.

Bunsen (“Egypt,” iii. 466), says in a note, “Arya” in Indian means lord. Its original meaning was equivalent to “upper noble.” The popular name “Arja” is derived from it, and means “descended from a noble.” I will only add that “Ari” in Egyptian means “honourable” (in Nofruari). But “ar” might mean to plough; for the Aryans were originally and essentially an agricultural, and therefore a peasant race. Agriculture at the time we are contemplating would have been the most honourable employment (supra, p. 329), it would not have been “an agricultural and therefore peasant” employment till insecurity brought about the state of dependence and vassalage. The Aryans would have been noble as being of the Japhetic race.

[282] I.e., “The teaching and government of the University remained in the Faculty of Arts,” and not in the faculty of theology or law or modern philosophy. I have for my own purposes of condensation been obliged to take certain unpardonable liberties of transposition in the above abstract, for which I can only plead my necessity. I should not in any case have so exceeded in quotation, were this very masterly address at all accessible, but, as far as I know, it is only to be found in the Catholic University Gazette, November 16, 1854.

In order to show the full significance of these extracts from Dr Newman, and also their bearing on points still to be discussed, I will append the following suggestive passage from Sir H. Maine’s “Ancient Law,” p. 22:—“It is only with the progressive societies that we are concerned, and nothing is more remarkable than their extreme fewness. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of Western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world. The tone of thought common among us, all our hopes, fears, and speculations, would be materially affected, if we had vividly before us the relation of the progressive races to the totality of human life. It is indisputable that much the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particular desire that its civil institutions should be improved since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by their embodiment in some permanent record.... There has been a material civilisation, but instead of the civilisation expanding the law, the law has limited the civilisation.”

I must also express my belief that if Mr Lowe had read the lecture of Dr Newman, he would have very much modified the views he enunciated in his lecture on “Primary and University Education,” at the Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh.—Times, November 4, 1867.

[283] “Ancient Law,” p. 123.

[284] It by no means follows that God does not will, and did not foreordain society in its wider organisation, according to the conditions and circumstances out of which it arose.

[285] Sir H. Maine says (p. 124):—“The points which lie on the surface of history are these: the eldest male parent—the eldest ascendant—is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over their children and their houses as over his slaves. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father.” [This is not borne out by what we read of Abraham and Lot, Esau and Jacob—e.g., “But Lot also, who was with Abraham, had flocks of sheep, and herds and tents. Neither was the land able to bear them, that they might dwell together” (Gen. xiii.). “And the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share, under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence.” The separation then commenced with the division of the inheritance; and whether it was ever an equal division, and not proportioned to the respective ages of the sons, or determined by other motives, or again, a division of different kinds of property, may be open to question; but at any rate a division took place, and a separation of families was consequent upon it. The division was not only the sign and token, but the efficient cause of the separation; and so not only the dispersion of families, but separate ownerships commenced with the descendants in the first degree.

[286] Compare Plato, “Leges;” Grote’s “Plato,” iii. 337.

[287] “In that old heathenism of the Roman world, into which it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be introduced by the apostles, there were then diverse and often conflicting elements. There was a good element, which came from God; there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan; and there was a corrupt element, which was the fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society, and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relation. The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, which literature consequently—after having been purified, and as it were baptized—has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, I say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and conscience, the tradition of a society of which God was Himself the founder. It enshrined whatever fragments of primeval truth as to God, the world, and man himself, still lingered, in whatever shape, among the far-wandering children of Adam. St Paul alludes to this element (Acts xvii. 22); ... and his words altogether seem to imply that God watched over it, supported it and fostered it, as far as men were worthy of it, and that it might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measures of grace from God, who left not Himself without witness in His daily providence, and was not far from ‘any one of His children.’”—“Four Sermons,” by the Rev. Henry J. Coleridge, S. J. Burns & Oates. 1869. P. 52. (48.)

[288] The word ‘????’ is found in the Hymn to Apollo, v. 20, attributed to Homer [the term ?e?ste? also, v. 391]—and in Hesiod, Op. et Dies, v. 276.—Goguet, ii. 78. In the Hymn to Apollo it is only applied to song. The Greeks had the same word, however—viz. ????, as for laws, songs, and pastures—that is to say, the term law, ????, is applied to the instrument of its transmission, and to what would then have been its most ordinary subject matter. This seems to me in evidence of its primitive use.

Take, moreover, the following passage in the First Book of the Iliad, v. 233:—

Here we have the term “dike” not merely in embryo, but in the compound word “dikaspoloi,” administrators of justice, implying something akin to judges, and a condition of things in which law was reduced to a state in which there was something to guard and administer. Not only so, but the staff, the “emblem of justice,” is borne by them when they guard the “Themistes” before the gods.

It will not only be curious to discover, but the discovery of vestiges in modern times of the old traditional modes and ceremonial will throw light upon the administration of justice in ancient times. I dare say many other instances may be indicated. I will adduce the following:—If my readers will turn to the Pall Mall Gazette (July 12, 1870), they will find an account of “The Manx Thing,” or “the ancient custom of the Ruler, his Council, and the Commons meeting together in the open air to proclaim the law to the people standing around.” “The Lieutenant-Governor is the representative of the King, and takes an oath to deal truly and uprightly between our sovereign lady the Queen and her people,” “and as indifferently betwixt party and party as this staff now standeth.” “He is assisted by two demesters or supreme judges, who must deem the law truly, as they will answer to the Lord of the Isle.” Here, as in Homer, there is reference to an emblem and a ceremonial repugnant to the notion that (infra) “every man under the patriarchal despotism was practically controlled by a regimen not of law but of caprice.”

Mr Adams describes the following scene in one of the islands in the archipelago off the mainland of Korea—“The chief, who really has something very noble and majestic about him, as is generally the case with men in high authority among the natives of these islands.... The demeanour of those of his countrymen who surrounded him was as free and independent as his own was reserved and dignified.... In his hand he held his badge of office, a wand of ebony with a green silken cord entwined about it like the serpent of Æsculapius.”—“Travels of a Naturalist in Japan and Manchuria,” by Arthur Adams, F.L.S. 1870. Compare also with infra, p. 390.

[289] I feel very much supported in my argument by the following passage from Mr Gladstone’s “Homer” (ii. 420): “Mr Grote says that ‘the primitive import’ of the words ??a???, es????, and ?a???, relates to power and not to worth; and that the ethical meaning of these is a later growth, which ‘hardly appears until the discussions raised by Socrates, and prosecuted by his disciples.’ I ask permission to protest against whatever savours of the idea that any Socrates whatever was the patentee of that sentiment of right and wrong which is the most precious part of the patrimony of mankind. The movement of Greek morality with the lapse of time was chiefly downward and not upward.... But as to the words ??a??? and ?a???, the case is far more clear; and here I ask, Can it be shown that Homer ever applies the word ??a??? to that which is morally bad? or the word ?a??? to that which is morally good? If it can, cadit quÆstio; if it cannot, then we have advanced a considerable way in proving the ethical signification.... In the word d??a???, however, we have an instance of the epithet never employed except in order to signify a moral or a religious idea. Like the word righteous among ourselves, it is derived from a source which would make it immediately designate duty as between man and man, and also as it arises out of civil relations. But it is applied in Homer to both the great branches of duty. And surely there cannot be a stronger proof of the existence of definite moral ideas among a people, than the very fact that they employ a word founded on the observance of relative rights to describe also the religious character. It is when religion and morality are torn asunder, that the existence of moral ideas is endangered.”

[290] Either, then, the Roman lawyers fell back upon the old traditions, or else the lawyers introduced the superstition of the law of nature, and then became victims to the superstition they had invented. In any case, the “belief” in “the lost code of nature gradually prevailed.” I am presently going to discuss with Sir H. Maine how far in the latter case such a belief is likely to have prevailed.

[291] Vide also Sir H. Maine, p. 77: “It is important, too, to observe that this model system, unlike many of those which have mocked men’s hopes in later days, was not entirely the product of imagination. It was never thought of as founded on quite untested principles. The notion was that it underlay existing law, and must be looked for through it. Its functions were, in short, remedial, not revolutionary or anarchical. And this unfortunately is the exact point at which the modern view of a law of nature has often ceased to resemble the ancient.”

[292] I shall consider that Dr Dyer has fairly reinstated a large portion of early Roman history until I see his arguments refuted. Without endorsing his opinion I may quote what Dr Dyer says (“Hist. of the City of Rome,” p. 27) in evidence of the admixture of the Sabine element:— “The importance of the Sabine element at Rome has not perhaps been sufficiently considered. The late M. Ampere has discussed the subject with great learning and ability in his interesting work, ‘L’Histoire Romaine À Rome.’ He remarks that not only did the Romans borrow from the Sabines almost all their religious and much of their political and social organisation, their customs, ceremonies, arms, &c., but also that the far greater part of the primitive population of Rome was Sabine, that most of the men who played a part in Roman history were of Sabine extraction, and that what is called the Latin tongue contains a strong infusion of Sabine elements.”

[293] Evidences of the Etruscan element are so marked, that NiebÜhr, in his first edition, asserted the Etruscan origin of the city. He subsequently, however, came to the conclusion that “there was so much in the Roman state that was peculiar to Rome and Latium, as to be incompatible with the supposition of Rome being an Etruscan colony.”—_Appendix to Travers Twiss’ Epitome of NiebÜhr._

[294] A federal union existed between the Roman people and the Latins in the reign of Servius Tullius (NiebÜhr, i. ch. xxv.) “The old Latin towns had retained their ancient rights, and the colonies, that together with them formed the Latin nation, had all received the full freedom of Rome, and had become municipia a full century before the Consul Junius Norbanus introduced the franchise of the Latin freedmen.... The towns on the north of the Po, inhabited by a mixed population of Italians and Celts speaking Latin,... were termed the ‘Lesser Latium.’... A law which regarded Latin citizens as foreigners, and applied to them the principle that the child follows the condition of the baser parent, can only have related to this inferior Latium.” (NiebÜhr, ii. ch. vi.)

[295] Vide also De Fresquet, “Droit Romain,” ii. 25–29.

[296] “The above table shows that before the separation of the Aryan race, every one of the degrees of affinity had received expression and sanction in language, for, although some spaces had to be left empty, the coincidences, such as they are, are sufficient to warrant one general conclusion.”—Vide table, Max MÜller’s Essays, ii. p. 31.

Of course, I am speaking only of the actual affinity, not of laws of succession founded upon it. These must be controlled by other considerations, and by other natural rights, as, for instance, the right of testation or by reasons of State requiring hereditary succession and a Salic law, or by reasons of family compelling the agnatic rule as the only mode of preserving the ancestral domain to the family—a necessity which applies as stringently to small freeholds as to broad manors.

In illustration, I quote the following passage from the Rev. W. Smith’s “Pentateuch” (above referred to, ch. xiii., “Indirect internal evidence of Mosaic authorship,” vol. i. 307)—“As the journey (Exodus) proceeds so laws originate from the accidents of the way.... The laws regulating the succession to property furnish an example of the same kind. In Numbers xxvi. 32–36 it is ordained in accordance with patriarchal usage, that the family inheritance descend by the male line. But a case immediately turns up where there happens to be no male issue. Zelophahad had left no sons, but only daughters, and what was to become of the property? How was the succession to be regulated? To meet the case, Jehovah orders Moses to proclaim the law of Numbers xxvii. 8–11, in virtue of which daughters, in failure of sons, are to succeed. Shortly after, a new difficulty arises. As heiresses, the daughters of Zelophahad were now to have property of their own. But if they married out of their tribe, was the property to go with them? (Num. xxxvi. 1–9.) Such a condition would at once have upset the fundamental laws of inheritance. Hence, to avoid the evil, they are enjoined to marry within their own tribe; and a general law to the same effect is promulgated” (xxxvi. 8, 9).

[297] “We should know almost nothing about it (agnation) if we had only the compilations of Justinian to consult; but the discovery of the MS. of Gaius discloses it to us at a most interesting epoch, just when it had fallen into complete discredit, and was verging on extinction.”—Ancient Law, p. 153.

[298] Gladstone’s Homer, i. 305–372.

[299] Id. i. 106–108.

[300] “The Greek mythology was derived from the Pelasgians, and the oracle of Dodona belonged to them.”—NiebÜhr, Hist. i. 28.

“The Pelasgians were a different nation from the Hellenes: their language was peculiar, and not Greek.... The Pelasgians, as well as the Hellenes, were members of the Amphictyonic association, the main tie of which was religion, in which both nations agreed.”—NiebÜhr, Hist. i. (Travers Twiss’ Epitome, ch. iii.)

“The royal laws became odious or obsolete, the mysterious deposit was silently preserved by the priests and the nobles, and at the end of sixty years the citizens of Rome still complained that they were ruled by the arbitrary sentence of the magistrate; yet the positive institutions of the kings had blended themselves with the public and private manners of the city; some fragments of that venerable jurisprudence were compiled by the diligence of antiquarians, and above twenty texts still speak the rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins.”—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vol. viii. ch. xiv.

[301] Gladstone, ii. 173, &c.; Strabo.

[302] Id. i. 294.

[303] Vide, Pastoret, “Hist. de la Legislation,” v. 21.

[304] “The oath taken by the deputies bound the Amphictyons not to destroy any of the Amphictyonic cities, or to debar them from the use of their fountains in peace or war; to make war on any who should transgress in these particulars ... or who should plunder the property of the god (the Delphine Apollo).... This is the oldest form of the Amphictyonic oath which has been recorded, and is expressly called by Æskines the ancient oath of the Amphictyons.”—Cyclop. of Arts and Sciences.

[305] The Ionian federation, composed also of twelve cities, was almost identical. “L’association s’etoit formÉe d’abord entre les douze citÉs, en y comprenant les deux Îles voisines de Samos et de Chio.... On s’assembloit dans un lieu sacrÉ du Mont Mycale, que les Ionians avoient dediÉs en commun À Neptune.”—Pastoret, ix. 170. There was also a confederacy of seven states, which met in the temple of Neptune, in the island of Calauria, “and which is even called by Strabo, viii. 374, an Amphictyonic Council.”—Cyclop. of Arts and Sciences, art. Amphic. Council.

[306] Adam Fergusson, “Essay on Civil Society,” 130. Whatever the conduct of the Iroquois or Five Nations (sometimes counted as six) may have been towards surrounding nations, the fidelity with which they held to their compacts among themselves is fully acknowledged.

Colden (“History of the Five Indian Nations”) says, “This union has continued so long that the Christians know nothing of the original of it.... Each of these nations is an absolute republick by itself, and every castle in each nation makes an independent republick and is governed by its own ‘Sachems’ or old men.... They have certain customs which they observe in their publick transactions with other nations, and in their private affairs among themselves; which it is scandalous for any one among them not to observe, and these always draw after them either publick or private resentment whenever they are broke.”

In Plato’s Republic, “It is laid down that the Greeks are natural enemies of the barbarians, but are natural friends and allies of one another, so that all hostilities between Greek states are to be avoided—are to be conducted on principles of mildness and forbearance, and to be considered as civil discord rather than foreign war.” “The ten kings of the Atlantic island were never to make war on each other—there was a sort of Congress between them.” Critias, chap. 15. Sir G. C. Lewis, “Method,” &c., ii. 234. This, taken in connection with what we know of the Amphictyonic Council, reads more like tradition than fiction.

[307] The general assemblies of Greece were held at Delos, “Comme MÉtropole du Culte,” Pastoret ix. 13. “Ce qu’il y a d’assurÉ, c’est que le Pontife exerÇoit sur plusieurs objets une vÉritable administration de la justice. La dÉcision n’en appartenoit qu’ À lui. Les rÈgles qu’il devoit suivre, le caractÈre et l’Étendue de ses droits, Étoient pareillement Établis dans le recueil connu sous le nom de Jus Pontificum (Macrobe parle deux fois de ce Jus Pontificum, mais comme d’un ouvrage perdu. Saturn, vii. chap. xiii.) Un fils du pontife romain Publius ScÆvola est mÊme citÉ dans le livre des Lois comme prÉtendant qu’on ne pouvoit exercer un si haut ministÈre sans savoir le droit civil. Quoi, tout entier? dit CicÉron, qui le refute; et qui font au pontife le droit des mers, le droit des eaux, ou d’autres droits semblables?”—Pastoret ix. 203. “Torts, then, are copiously enlarged upon in primitive jurisprudence. It must be added that Sins are known to it also. Of the Teutonic codes it is almost unnecessary to make this assertion.... But it is also true that non-Christian bodies of archaic law entail penal consequences on certain classes of acts and on certain classes of omissions, as being violations of divine prescriptions and commands. The law administered at Athens by the senate of the Areopagus was probably a special religious code; and at Rome, apparently from a very early period, the Pontifical jurisprudence punished adultery, sacrilege, and perhaps murder. There were, therefore, in the Athenian and in the Roman states laws punishing sins.”—Sir H. Maine, pp. 371, 372.

The expression unwritten laws (???af?? ????) first occurs in the funeral oration of Pericles (Thuc. ii. 37), when it appears to denote those laws of the state which are corroborated by the moral sanction. It next occurs.... Xenophon, Mem. iv. 4, § 19, 25, ... the expression was doubtless adopted by Socrates from popular usage. Thus Plato speaks of t? ?a???e?a ?p? t?? p????? ???afa ???a (Leg. vii. 793). Vide Sir G. C. Lewis, “Method of Rea. in Pol.,” ii. 27. [The “laws called unwritten by the multitude” must evidently imply laws known to the multitude but in tradition.]

Cicero, “De Natura Deorum,” iii., says, “Habes, Balba, quid Cotta, quid pontifex sentiat. Fac nunc, ego intelligam, quid tu sentias: a te enim philosopho rationem accipere debes religionis; majoribus autem nostris etiam nulla ratione reddita credere.” “Lex est cui homines obtemperare convenit, cum ob alia multa, tum ab eo maxime quod lex omnis inventus quidem, ac dei munus est.” “Lex est sanctio sancta, jubens honesta, prohibens contraria.”

[308] This last sentence is only a gloss of Cicero’s from the stoical point of view, since clearly the enunciation of the oracle would compel the conclusion, that what was most ancient and nearest the gods was the best, and not that the best, as abstractly conceived, was to be held the most ancient, &c. A moment’s consideration will suffice to show that in this substitution is involved the whole extent of the difference between the principle of conservation and the principle of change.

“DemosthÈne qui avait en faire tant de mauvaises lois, prononÇait que" toutes les lois sont l’ouvrage et le prÉsent des dieux “et c’Était À ce titre qu’il rÉclamit pour elles l’obÉissance des hommes. Socrate professait la mÊme doctrine.”—Ozanam, “Les Germains avant le Christianisme,” i., 159. Again, “Quand on Étudie les lois indiennes on y voit tout un grand peuple enchaÎnÉ par la terreur des dieux. Le livre de la loi s’annonce comme une revelation.... Les prescriptions du droit sacrÉ enveloppent pour ainsi dire toute la vie civile, et c’est lÀ qu’on decouvre enfin la raison de tant de coutumes dont les Occidentaux avaient conservÉ la lettre, mais non l’esprit.”—Id. p. 161. “If the customs and institutions of barbarians have one characteristic more striking than another, it is their extreme uniformity” (Maine’s “Ancient Law,” p. 366). “There are in nature certain fountains of justice whence all civil laws are derived but as streams; and like as waters do take tinctures and tastes from the soils through which they run, so do civil laws vary according to the regions and governments where they are planted, though they proceed from the same fountains.” (Bacon, “Advancement of Learning,” B. ii. W. iii. 475, ap.; D. Rowland, “On the Moral Commandments,” p. 85.)

[309] “L’erreur a ÉtÉ de croire qu’il n’est rien de plus facile À l’homme que de suivre la nature, tandis que c’est au contraire le chef-d’oeuvre de l’art que de la contenir dans les bornes que la nature lui prescrit: c’est oÙ peuvent À peine parvenir les legislateurs les plus sages. Que de prÉjugÉs À Éteindre! que d’erreurs À combattre! que d’habitudes À vaincre! toutes choses qui dans tous les temps commandent impÉrieusement au genre humain.”—_L’AntiquitÉ dÉvoilÉe par ses usages_, i. 1. ii. ch. iii. par Boulanger.

[310] ??????d??a?—“Feciales quia interpretes et arbitri sunt pacis et belli.”—Lexicon, Ben-Hederic, Ernesti.

Vide also Plutarch, “Numa;” Livy, lib. i. c. 34.

Vattel, iii. c. iv., says:—“It is surprising to find among the Romans such justice, such moderation and prudence, at a time too when apparently nothing but courage and ferocity was to be expected from them.”

[311] Gladstone, “Homer and the Homeric Age,” iii. 4.

[312] “To demolish a trophy was looked on as unlawful, and a kind of sacrilege, because they were all dedicated to some deity; nor was it less a crime to pay crime to pay divine adoration before them, or to repair them when decayed, as may be likewise observed of the Roman triumphal arches.... For the same reason, those Grecians who introduced the custom of erecting pillars for trophies incurred a severe censure from the ages they lived in.”—Potters “ArchÆologia,” ii. c. 12. “Before the Greeks engaged themselves in war it was usual to publish a declaration of the injuries they had received, and to demand satisfaction by ambassadors; which custom was observed even in the most early ages.... It is therefore no wonder what Polybius relates of the Ætolians, that they were held for the common outlaws and robbers of Greece, it being their manner to strike without warning, and make war without any previous or public declaration.”—Id. ii. c. vii. p. 64. (Compare infra, ch. xv.)

[313] “Omnes portas concionabundus ipse imperator circumiit, et quibuscumque irritamentis poterat, iras militum accuebat, nunc fraudem hostium incusans, qui, pace petita, induciis datis, per ipsum induciarum tempus, contra jus gentium ad castra oppugnando venisset.”—P. Livius, 1. xc.

[314] “De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” l. i. c. l. § x. n n, 1 et 2.

[315] Sir G. C. Lewis (“Method, &c., of Reasoning in Politics,” ii. 35), quotes Mr Ward, “History of Law of Nations” (i. 127), to the effect “That what is commonly called the law of nations, is not the law of all nations, but only of such sets or classes of them as are united together by similar religions and systems of morality.” Sir G. C. Lewis’ view is that “as there are no universal principles of civil jurisprudence which belongs to each community, so there are no universal principles of international law which are common to all communities.”—Id.

[316] Since writing the above, I have read a series of papers (which commenced I think in August 1871) in the Tablet under the title of “Arbitration instead of War,” and I perceive that the writer arrives by a different route at a similar conclusion. I should have had pleasure in incorporating the argument with this chapter, but I shall do better if I induce my readers to peruse and weigh it as it deserves.

[317] I allude to the ancient prophecy of St Malachy. Its authenticity as the prophecy of St Malachy may be questioned; but the antiquity of the prediction, and its existence in print early in the sixteenth century is, I believe, fully established. The copy which lies before me will be found in Moreri’s Dictionary of 1732, in the Pontificate of Innocent XIII. Twelve mottoes given in prediction from that date, fits the motto “crux de cruce,” to the 12th successor of Innocent, viz. Pius IX. Ten other mottoes follow commencing with “lumen in coelo.”

[318] “The pontifical power is, from its essential constitution, the least subject to the caprices of politics. He who wields it is, moreover, always aged, unmarried, and a priest; all which circumstances exclude ninety-nine hundredths of all the errors and passions which disturb states.”—De Maistre, Du Pape, B. II. chap. iv.

[319] “The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when the cameleopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.... The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, _and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila.”—Macaulay’s Essays, “Review of Ranke’s Popes._”

[320] Sir G. C. Lewis, “Method, &c.,” ii. 285, enumerates several.

[321] In De Quincey’s Works, xii. 140, there is a disquisition on Kant’s scheme “of a universal society founded on the empire of political justice,” where it is competent that as the result of wars man must be inevitably brought “to quit the barbarous condition of lawless power and to enter into a federal league of nations, in which even the weakest number looks for its rights and protection—not to its own power, or its own adjudication, but to this great confederation (foedus amphictyonum), to the united power, and the adjudication of the collective will,” and is said to be “the inevitable resource and mode of escape under that pressure of evil which nations reciprocally inflict,” and which seems to contemplate a situation like the present. “Finally war itself becomes gradually not only so artificial a process, so uncertain in its issue, but also is the after-pains of inextinguishable national debts (a contrivance of modern times) so anxious and burdensome; ... that at length those governments which have no immediate participation in the war, under a sense of their own danger, offer themselves as mediators, though as yet without any sanction of law, and thus prepare all things from afar for the formation of a great primary state-body or cosmopolitic Areopagus, such as is wholly unprecedented in all preceding ages.” I am fully aware of the divergence of this view from that which I have indicated, but I wish to point out that it is only “unprecedented” in so far as it is cosmopolitic and extends to all humanity; but so extending it ought not to include the traditional notions of an “Areopagus”—foedus amphictyonum—or confederation of states. It ought rather to talk of an interfusion of states, the only condition upon which the cosmopolitic Areopagus would be possible; yet it inevitably falls into the traditionary lines. Moreover, before mankind can attain to this inter-fusion of states, one supreme difficulty, which seems always to be over-looked, must be overcome, we must bring mankind back to be “of one lip and one speech.” The scheme, on the other hand, of a federation cannot be pronounced impracticable until it has been tried; yet, although it lies latent in the idea of Christendom, and although it has had a sort of informal recognition in the theory and policy of the balance of power, there has never been any understanding from which we can gather what the results would be, if the bond of federation were ever cemented by any solemn pledge or sanction.

[322] “Historicus” (Letter in the Times, February 12, 1868) writes—“The system of international law professes to be a code of rules which ought to govern, and in fact in a great degree does govern, the conduct of independent nations in their dealings with one another.... How can one doubt that in fact such a rule exists and does operate? Let us test the matter by an example. When the news of the affair of the Trent reached England, what was the first question that every one asked? Was it not this, ‘Is this act conformable to the law of nations, or is it not?’ Did not the English Cabinet summon all the most distinguished jurists to advise them what the law of nations was? Was not the decision absolutely dependent on their advice.... The code of the law of nations, based on all other laws, on morality, deduced by the reasoning of jurists from well established principles, illustrated by precedents, gathered from usage, confirmed by experience, has become from age to age more and more respected as the arbiter of the rights and duties of nations, ... and now, after this system has been elaborated with so much care, and has yielded results so beneficial to the human race, we are to be told that the only real question in differences between nations is, ‘Whether, all things considered, it is or is not worth while to go to war?’ not, be it observed, right or wrong to go to war. This is exactly the doctrine set forth in the celebrated Thelian controversy recorded in Thucydides.” W. Oke Manning, “Commentaries on the Law of Nations” (p. 17), says, “Sir J. Mackintosh in his ‘Hist. of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy’ (prefixed to the ‘EncyclopÆdia Britannica,’ p. 315), speaks of Suarez as the writer who first saw that international law was composed not only of the simple principles of justice applied to intercourse between states, but of those usages long observed in that intercourse by the European race which have since been more exactly distinguished as the consuetudinary law acknowledged by the Christian nations of Europe and America. But Suarez himself speaks of this distinction as already recognised by previous writers.”

[323] “La religion ChrÉtienne, qui ne semble avoir d’objet que la fÉlicitÉ de l’autre vie, fait encore notre bonheur dans celle-ci.... Que d’un cÔtÉ, l’on se mette devant les yeux les massacres continuels des rois et des chefs grecs et romains, ... et nous verrons que nous devons au Christianisme, et dans le gouvernement un certain droit politique, et dans la guerre un certain droit des gens, que la nature humaine ne saurait assez reconnaÎtre.”—Montesquieu, “Esprit des Lois,” i. xxiv. chap. 3.

[324] I must here do Mr Urquhart the justice to point out that he has been the principal advocate of this doctrine, that the declaration of war is the turning-point upon which everything depends, and more than any other man has laboured to enforce it. (Vide “Effects on the World of the Restoration of Canon Law,” by D. Urquhart, 1869.) At p. 61, Mr Urquhart refers to the action taken by the Fecials. I have the misfortune to differ with Mr Urquhart on many points, but I have pleasure in bearing testimony as above.

[325] The Very Rev. Dr Rock (“Textile Fabrics,” p. xii.) says—”The ancient British speciality was wool, and the postulants asking admission to the different castes, the sacerdotal, bardic, and the leeches or natural philosophers, were distinguished by stripes of white [Cicero (De Legibus, ii. 18) says, “Color autem albus prÆcipere decorus deo est quum in cateris tum maxima in textili”], blue, and green severally on their mantles, although the bards themselves were distinguished by some one of the colours above-mentioned (vide infra). [The significance of this will be noted at p. 391.] I may further remark, parenthetically, that here is an instance of national civilisation being pari passu with religious traditions. The British speciality was wool—query, because “of the heavy stress laid upon the rule which taught that the official colour in their dress,” &c. (Id., vide ante, chap. xii. p. 292.)

St Paul says (Heb. ix. 19), “For when every commandment of the Lord had been read by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people” (Goguet, “Origin of Laws,” ii. p. 9). The Spaniards in 1643 made a treaty of peace with the Indians of Chili; they have preserved the memory of the forms used at the ratification. It is said that the Indians killed many sheep, and stained in their blood a branch of the cane-tree, which the deputy of the Caciques put into the hands of the Spanish general in token of peace and alliance.” Goguet also refers to Heb. ix. 19.

[326] De Fresquet, “Droit Romain,” i. 48.

[327] Compare with the description of Saturn, “Saturnus, velato capite falcam gerens.”—Fulgent. Mythol. i. c. 2.

[328] In the above extract from MontfauÇon it should have been added, that when the Romans sent one of their fecials to declare war he went in sacerdotal habit—“Arrivant au confins de la ville, il appelloit À temoins Jupiter et les autres dieux comme il alloit demander rÉparation de l’injure au nom des Romains, il faisoit des imprÉcations sur lui et sur la ville de Rome, s’il disoit rien contre la vÉritÉ, et continuoit son chemin ... s’il rencontroient quelque citoien quelque payisan (paysan) il repÉtoit toujours ses imprÉcations,” &c.

[329] A somewhat similar scene is also indistinctly traced in the following:—“Wood relates that on his visit to St Julian in 1670, in walking inland he ‘met seven savages, who came running down the hill to us, making several signs for us to go back again, with much warning and noise, yet did not offer to draw their arrows. But one of them who was an old man came nearer to us than the rest, and made also signs we should depart, to whom I threw a knife, a bottle of brandy, and a neckcloth, to pacify him; but seeing him persist in the same signs as before, and that the savageness of the people seemed incorrigible, we returned on board again.’” Quoted by R. O. Cunningham, “Natural History of the Straits of Magellan and West Coast of Patagonia,” 1871, p. 143. A similar scene is described by Roggerwsen in his voyage, I think, to Easter Island.

This, in connection with the scene at Bolabola, recalls the mode of procedure in the Odyssey, ix. 95 (Pope), when Ulysses reaches

[330] Vide Captain Wallis’ Voyage, in “Hist. Account of all the Voyages round the World,” 1773, iii. p. 79.

[331] Caduceatores—compare supra, p. 348. In connection with these latter, let us inquire more particularly as to their wand of office, the caduceus. “In its oldest form” it “was merely a bough twined round with white wool; afterwards a white or gilded staff with imitations of foliage and ribands was substituted for the old rude symbol. These were probably not turned into snakes till a much later age, when that reptile had acquired a mystic character.” MÜller’s explanation is that it was originally the olive branch with the stemmata, which latter became developed into serpents.—Encyc. of Arts and Sciences. If, therefore, MÜller’s explanation is correct, the oldest form of the symbol of office of those who were the depositaries of laws of nations in the matter of peace and war, was a symbol which has a special history and significance in connection with the Deluge. Will this not tend to identify their institution with that epoch? It will, perhaps, be said that the branch of a tree is in any case a natural symbol of peace. But why a symbol or token at all? Why more than a simple gesture of salutation? unless the symbol embodied some idea which conveyed a pledge over and above? What, then, was this idea, unless the traditional idea? It may appear to us a natural emblem, but it is not so from association of ideas with the scriptural dove and olive branch? and yet consider how universal it is. Captain Cook’s Voyages (i. p. 38; London, 1846) says, “It is remarkable that the chief, like the people in the canoes, presented to us the same symbol of peace that is known to have been in use among the ancient and mighty nations of the northern hemisphere, the green branch of a tree.” This occurred both in New Zealand and Otaheite. Wallis (“Voyages round the World,” iii. 98) says that on an occasion when the Otaheitans wished to testify fidelity and friendliness, “the Indians cut branches from the trees and laid them in a ceremonious manner at the feet of the seamen; they painted themselves red with the berries of a tree, and stained their garments yellow with the bark of another.” We have, as we have just seen, found this symbol in the caduceus, and it appears to me that the caduceus in its earlier form of a staff with foliage and ribands, is recognisable in the Gothic monuments as given in Stephens’ “Central America.” Vide also Cunningham’s “Bhilsa Topes.” Washington Irving (“Life of Columbus,” iii. 214) speaks of the natives coming forward to meet them with white flags; and the same, if I remember rightly, is recorded in Cook’s visit to the Sandwich Islanders. The white flag is our own symbol; but what is the white flag but the development and refinement of the staff and white wool? Again, why are stripes, in a variety of combination of colour, the characteristic symbol of flags? The reader will find the answer on returning to the text, where he will also learn the significance of the red and yellow, in the above descriptions.

[332] II. p. 317.

[333] Vide also in Carver’s “North America” (p. 296), an engraving of the Indian “Calumet of Peace,”—the stem is of a light wood curiously painted with hieroglyphics in various colours, and adorned with the feathers of the most beautiful birds. It is not in my power to convey an idea of the various tints and pleasing ornaments of this much-esteemed Indian implement"(p. 359).

[334] It will hardly be denied that the tradition of the rainbow as a sign and pledge to man existed among the ancients. Vide Bryant, ii. 348. [The goddess Iris, who was sent with the messages of the gods, bore the same name as the rainbow Iris.]

E.g. Homer—

Also—Il. xvii. 547.

And the lines (Theog. v. 700) in Hesiod, in which Iris is called the daughter of Wonder, who is sent over the broad surface of the sea when strife and discord arose among the immortals, and who is also called “the great oath of the gods”—[“This is the token of the covenant between you and me, for perpetual generations,” Gen. ix. 12.]—who is told to bring from afar in her golden pitcher the many-named water.

Iris is called the daughter of Thaumas (which so closely approximates to the Greek Ta?a = wonder, Bryant says to the Egyptian “Thaumus”). Bryant further thinks that Iris and Eros were originally the same term, but that in time the latter was formed into the boyish deity Cupid = Eros. According to some, Iris was the mother of Eros by Zephyrus. [There were indeed three Eroses, which mark three different lines of tradition, vide Gladstone on Iris (the rainbow), “Homer and the Homeric Age,” ii. 156.] Eros (Cupid), though a boy, was supposed to have been at the commencement of all things; and Lucian says, “How came you with that childish face, when we know you to be as old as Japetus?” The union of Cupid and Chaos (the Deluge is frequently alluded to as chaos, vide Bryant) “gave birth to men and all the animals.” Hesiod makes Eros the first to appear after Chaos. “At this season (Deluge) another era began; the earth was supposed to be renewed, and time to return to a second infancy. They therefore formed an emblem of a child with a rainbow, to denote this renovation of the world, and called him Eros, or Divine Love,” ... “yet esteemed the most ancient among the gods.”—Bryant, ii. 349. (Cupid is represented with a bow, as is also Apollo and Diana, which was an allusion to the supposed resemblance of the bow and the rainbow.) Probably from his connection with Iris, he is represented as breaking the thunderbolts of Jupiter, and riding on dolphins and subduing other monsters of the sea. Smith (“Myth. Dict.”) says Iris is derived from ??? e???, “so that Iris would mean the speaker or messenger,” ... “but it is not impossible that it may be connected with e???, ‘I join,’ whence e?????; so that Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, would be the joiner, or conciliator, or the messenger of heaven, who restores peace in nature,” It appears to me more likely that e????? = peace (derivation uncertain—Liddell and Scott) was derived directly from Iris, in accordance with the tradition, and that the Greek word for wool, e????, was cognate to e?????, from being an emblem of peace (e.g. the pontiff’s caduceator, woollen veil). In the same way, if we do not actually find the rainbow as the token of the herald or caduceator, may we not discover it conversely in the circumstance that Iris is represented as carrying in her hand a _herald’s_ staff?It is curious that we actually find, what I may call the sister emblem, viz. the Dove, used by the ancients, though just as we find, if I am right in the conjecture, the rainbow among the Polynesians, used in a perverted way as an ensign of war. It was possibly in superstitious remembrance of the tradition which we find more directly among the ancient Aryans and the Peruvians (p. 326–400), that war ought only to be made with a disposition towards peace; and that they thought to place themselves under the sanction of heaven by carrying this emblem as their ensign of war. Such, however, was the fact. Bryant (ii. 302) says:—“The dove became a favourite hieroglyphic among the Babylonians and Chaldees.... In respect to the Babylonians, it seems to have been taken by them for their national ensign, and to have been depicted on their military standard when they went to war. They seem likewise to have been styled IÖnim, or the children of the Dove;” and they are thus alluded to by the Prophet Jeremiah, ch. xxv. ver. 38 (id.) Bryant says (ii. 285), “The name of the Dove among the ancient Amonians (by which term he intends the descendants of Chus) was IÖn and IÖnah; sometimes expressed IÖnas, from whence came the ???a? of the Greeks.”

I should rather put it that we find the word for the Dove common to the Hebrew and the Greek (IÖnah, Hebrew; ???a?, Greek), and, as Bryant seems to imply, among other nations also—e.g. the Babylonians—which is precisely what we should have expected. But if this identity is allowed, we must proceed with Bryant to see in Juno, Venus, and Diana, simply embodiments of the tradition of the Dove. Bryant says that “Juno is the same as IÖna,” and although, as we have seen, the peacock is said to be her bird (with reference to the other symbol, the rainbow), and although Ovid (Bryant, 344) sends her to heaven accompanied by Iris (rainbow), yet in the plate (from Gruter) p. 410, she will be seen with a dove on her wand, and a pomegranate, as symbol of the ark (vide p. 380), in her hand. Bryant, moreover (344), considers Juno to be identical with Venus. There was a statue in Laconia called Venus-Junonia. Of Dione and Venus Bryant says (ii. 341):—“I have mentioned that the name Diona was properly Ad, or Ada, IÖna. Hence came the term Idione; which Idione was an object of idolatry as early as the days of Moses. But there was a similar personage named Deione.... This was a compound of De IÖne, the dove; and Venus Dionoea may sometimes have been formed in the same manner.... Dionusus was likewise called Thyomus.” Vide also Bryant, pp. 316, 317. In Genesis viii. 9, the dove returned to the ark, not having found “where her foot might rest.” “In the hieroglyphical sculptures and paintings where this history was represented, the dove could not well be depicted otherwise than as hovering over the face of the deep. Hence it is that Venus or Dione is said to have risen from the sea. Hence it is, also, that she is said to preside over waters; to appease the troubled ocean; and to cause by her presence an universal calm; that to her were owing [on the retiring of the waters] the fruits of the earth.... She was the Oenas (‘???a?’) of the Greeks; whence came the Venus of the Latins.” The address of Lucretius to this deity concludes with two lines of remarkable significance—

“In Sicily, upon Mount Eryx, was a celebrated temple of this goddess, which is taken notice of by Cicero and other writers. Doves were here held as sacred as they were in Palestine or Syria [vide also in Cashmere, p. 64]. It is remarkable that there were two days of the year set apart in this place for festivals, called ??a????a and ?ata????a, at which time Venus was supposed to depart over the sea, and after a season to return. There were also sacred pigeons, which then took their flight from the island; but one of them was observed on the ninth day to come back from the sea, and to fly to the shrine of the goddess. This was upon the festival of ??a????a. Upon this day it is said that there were great rejoicings. On what account can we imagine this veneration for the bird to be kept up, ... but for a memorial of the dove sent out of the ark, and of its return from the deep to Noah? The history is recorded upon the ancient coins of Eryx; which have on one side the head of Janus bifrons, and on the other the sacred dove.”—Bryant, ii. 319.

Mr Cox’s (“Mythology,” ii. ch. ii. sec. vii.) counter-explanation, if I rightly gather it, is that “on AphroditÊ (Venus), the child of the froth or foam of the sea, was lavished all the wealth of words denoting the loveliness of the morning; and thus the Hesiodic poet goes on at once to say that the grass sprung up under her feet as she moved, that Eros, Love, walked by her side, and Himeros, longing, followed after her.” “This is but saying, in other words, that the morning, the child of the heavens, springs up first from the sea, as Athene is born by the water-side.” But why should the morning spring first from the sea?—more particularly when the effects of her rising is noted in the springing up of flowers on the land? If the rainbow, we see the reason in her connection with the Deluge, and her connection with the subsequent renovation of nature. Mr Cox also says (p. 3):—“In her brilliant beauty she is ArgunÎ, a name which appears again in that of Arguna, the companion of Krishna and the Hellenic Argynius.” Does not this complete the chain of her connection with Juno? Mr Cox (p. 8) says:—“The Latin Venus is, in strictness of speech, a mere name, to which any epithet might be attached according to the conveniences or the needs of the worshipper.... The name itself has been, it would seem, with good reason, connected with the Sanscrit root ‘van,’ to desire love or favour,”—a derivation which equally accords with Bryant’s view. Then there is the striking connection of Venus with Dionusos (vide p. 395). Mr Cox (p. 9) says, “The myth of Adonis links the legends of Aphrodite (Venus) with those of Dionusos. Like the Theban wine-god Adonis, born only on the death of his mother; and the two myths are, in one version, so far the same that Dionysos, like Adonis, is placed in a chest, which, being cast into the sea, is carried to BrasiÆ, where the body of his mother is buried.” (Comp. Kabiri, Bunsen.) Mr Cox connects Athene with Aphrodite (Venus) (p. 4). Therefore we must ask him to reconsider his explanation of “the Athenian maidens embroidering the sacred peplos for the ship presented to AthÊne at the great Dionysiac festival.” Compare evidence, supra, in chap. on Boulanger, &c.; Catlin.

[335] Vide ante, 391. That the entwined snakes were of late date would appear, I think, from the allusions to the suppliants’ wands in Æschylus, e.g. (vide Plumtre’s Æschylus, “Libation Pourers,” v. 1024) when Orestes puts on the suppliants wreaths, and takes the olive branch in his hand—

and in the Supplicants (22)—

[336] Also, “Joannis Meursii Themis Athica, sive de Legibus Alticis,” i. xi. says, “Postquam vero exercitus eductus esset pugnam inire, non licebat antiquam emissum agmen hostium quis, hunc expectans accepisset.”

[337] This has something in common with the fiery cross sent round by the Highlanders as the summons to war. In another aspect it has resemblances with the Indian mode of declaration of war. “The manner in which the Indians declare war against each other is by sending a slave with a hatchet, the handle of which is painted red, to the nation which they intend to break with; and the messenger, notwithstanding the danger to which he is exposed from the sudden fury of those whom he thus sets at defiance, executes his commission with great fidelity.”—Carver’s “Travels in North America,” p. 307.

[338] That there may be limitations to the horrors of war, seems to be established by the instance of the prohibition of explosive bullets. I read in the Times (March 11, 1871):—“The British Medical Journal declares its opinion that the charges which have been put forward of explosive bullets having been used by the contending armies have been groundless; and is inclined to believe that the articles of the St Petersburg Convention have been faithfully adhered to, notwithstanding the mutual recriminations to the contrary by both French and German Governments.”

[339] Indirect evidence of the importance formerly attached to the declaration of war may, I think, be discovered in the formal addresses and invocations of the gods by the Homeric heroes previous to combat, which to us seem so forced and unnatural; and the same sentiment was noticed by the Spaniards, when they first came over, among the Peruvians, who did not neglect the punctilio of the declaration of war even in their most high-handed aggressions, e.g. Garcilasso de la Vega (Hakluyt Soc. ed. ii. 141) says—“The invaders sent the usual summons that the people might not be able to allege afterwards that they had been taken unawares.”

[340] Carver (“Travels in North America,” p. 301) says of the Indians—“Sometimes private chiefs make excursions.... These irregular sallies, however, are not always approved of by the elder chiefs, though they are often obliged to connive at them.... But when war is national, and undertaken by the community, their deliberations are formal and slow. The elders assemble in council, to which all the head warriors and young men are admitted, when they deliver their opinions in solemn speeches; weighing with maturity the nature of the enterprise they are about to engage in, and balancing with great sagacity the advantages or inconveniences that will arise from it. Their priests are also consulted on the subject, and even sometimes the advice of the most intelligent of their women is asked. If the determination be for war they prepare for it with much ceremony.”

[341] “In ancient times war was solemnly declared either by certain fixed ceremonies or by the announcement of heralds; and a war commenced without such declaration was regarded as informal and irregular, and contrary to the usages of nations. Grotius says that a declaration of war is not necessary by the law of nations—“Naturali jure nulla requiritur declaratio,” but that it was required by the law of nations, jure gentium, by which term, be it remembered, he means the usages of nations. And in this he was right, as until the age in which he lived wars were almost invariably preceded by solemn declarations. The Romans, according to Albericus Gentilis, did not grant a triumph for any war which had been commenced without a formal declaration (De Jure Belli, c. ii. § i.); but the Greeks do not seem to have been at all regular in the observance of the custom (Bynkershock, QuÆs. Jur. Pub., l. i. c. ii.) During the times of chivalry declarations of war were usually given with great formality, the habits of knighthood being carried into the customs of general warfare, and it being held mean to fall upon an adversary when unprepared to defend himself (Ward, Introd. ii. 206–230). With the decline of chivalry this custom fell into disuse. Gustavus Adolphus invaded Germany without any declaration of war (Zouch, De Judicio inter Gentes, P. ii. § x. 1); but this appears to have been an exception to the usages of the age, and Clarendon speaks of declarations of war as being customary in his time, and blames the war in which the Duke of Buckingham went to France, as entered into ‘without so much as the formality of a declaration from the king, containing the ground and provocation and end of it, according to custom and obligation in the like cases.’ Formal denunciations of war by heralds were discontinued about the time of Grotius; the last instance having been, according to Voltaire, when Louis XIII. sent a herald to Brussels to declare war against Spain in 1635.”—W. Oke Manning’s Commentaries on Law of Nations.

[342] “Looking back on the history of the autumn ... we may yet be impressed by the conviction that, had the union of the European family of nations been strengthened as it might have been before the war broke out, it might never have been begun, or would have long since terminated. The Treaty of Paris put on record a declaration in favour of arbitration, but it proved to be worthless when sought to be applied.”—Times, Feb. 15, 1871. I shall have a word to say presently on the declaration of the Treaty of Paris.

[343] It must not be forgotten, however, that it was the revolution in Paris which gave this war its abnormal character, and created situations for which the law of nations had no precedents, or precedents only which were of doubtful application.

[344] Compare infra, p. 412.

[345] Compare with the following account of the declaration of war by M. F. de Champagny, de L’Acad. Fr., in the Correspondant, 25 Juin 1871:—“A government wrongly inspired proposed to us a war. Without asking it why it wished to make it, without asking if it could make it, without reflection, without discussion, without listening to the men of name and experience, who implored of us at least twenty-four hours for reflection, we accepted this war, I do not say with enthusiasm, but with frivolous levity, not as crusaders, but as children. It seemed to us sufficient to tipple in the ‘cafÉs,’ singing the ‘Marseillaise,’ to intoxicate the soldiers, to throw squibs into what were then called sensational journals, to cry ‘À Berlin!’ in order to go right off to Berlin. And when it was discovered that we were not going on at all to Berlin, but that Berlin was coming to Paris, that this enthusiasm of the ‘cafÉ’ did not cause armies to spring into life, what was our resource? Always the same: to overthrow a government!”

[346] Vide note 19, p. 403.

[347] These were the words which the Marquis of Bath had the courage to use in the House of Lords when everybody else was joining in a ludicrous “dirge of homage” to Cavour. I wish to put this protest, as well as the similar protests of the Marquis of Normanby and the Earl of Donoughmore on record, as there may come a time when England will be glad to recur to them.

[348] Vide “Current Events,” in Rambler, 1860.

[349] “Does the faith of treaties, the right of treaties, still exist? Look at what has happened in Europe during the last twenty years. The treaties made with the Church were the first violated; they have declared that a ‘concordat’ is nothing more than a law of the State, which the State can alter at will—in other words, that, unlike all other contracts, conventions of this nature, inviolable for one of the parties, can be broken by the other at its pleasure; kings have thus put the Church outside the law of nations. But, in consequence, they have excluded themselves. When the most sacred of all treaties were thus trampled upon, how would they have the others respected? They have even written, or caused to be written, on a solemn occasion (‘Napoleon III. et L’Italie, 1859’) that treaties no longer bind when the general sentiment declares against them; in other terms, when they displease us. At this epoch, in 1859, we were disputing with Austria a possession which all treaties had guaranteed to her, and the neutral signatories of these treaties did not protest. Victorious over Austria, we have in our turn made a treaty with her; and this treaty was violated when scarcely signed; and neither we nor the rest of Europe protested. Later on, the dissensions between Germany and Denmark ended in a treaty, which the rest of Europe guaranteed; but soon Germany broke this treaty by force of arms, and Europe did not say a word. I omit here the convention of September, ... the treaty of 1856. On all these occasions the indifference of third parties has come to the aid of the cupidity of the aggressors; and the moral sense has been so far wanting in the Cabinets that they have assisted and applauded acts of brigandage for the love of the art, and without even thinking that the brigand, when he grew strong, would fall on the morrow on themselves. Will you find in European history twelve years so fruitful in pledges and perjuries?”