5 2o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



impossible to avoid thinking at first sight that the butterflies themselves have 

 been attacked by real fungi." 



On recalling the fact that, a few generations ago, all civilized 

 people believed, as many civilized people believe still, that decaying 

 meat is itself transformed into maggots, on being reminded that 

 among our peasantry, at the present time, the thread-like aquatic 

 worm Gordius is said to be horse-hair that has fallen into the water 

 and become living, we shall see it to be inevitable that these extreme 

 resemblances should suggest the notion of actual metamorphoses. 

 That this notion, so suggested, becomes a belief, is a proved fact. In 

 Java and neighboring regions inhabited by it, that marvelous insect, 

 " the walking leaf," is positively asserted to be a leaf that has become 

 animated. What else should it be? In the absence of that explana- 

 tion of mimicry so happily hit upon by Mr. Bates, no natural origin 

 for such wonderful likenesses between things wholly unallied can be 

 imagined. And, while there is no generalized knowledge, there is 

 nothing to prevent acceptance of these apparent transformations as 

 real transformations ; indeed, apparent and real are not distinguished 

 until criticism and skepticism have made some progress. 



Once established, the belief in transformation extends itself with- 

 out resistance to other classes of things. Between an egg and a 

 young bird, there is a far greater contrast in appearance and structure 

 than between one mammal and another. The tadpole, with a tail and 

 no limbs, differs from a young frog with four limbs and no tail, more 

 than a man differs from a hyena ; for both of these have four limbs, 

 and both laugh. Evidently, then, the natural metamorphoses so 

 abundant throughout Nature, joined with these apparent metamor- 

 phoses which the primitive man inevitably confounds with them, ori- 

 ginate the conception of metamorphoses in general, which rises into 

 an explanation everywhere employed without check. 



Here, again, we have to note that, while initiating and fostering the 

 notion that things of all kinds may suddenly change their forms, the 

 experiences of transformation confirm the notion of duality. Each 

 object is not only what it seems, but is potentially something else. 



What is a shadow? Familiar as mature life has made us with 

 shadows, and almost automatic as has become the interpretation of 

 them in terms of physical causation, we do not ask how they look to 

 the absolutely ignorant. 



Those, from whose minds the thoughts of childhood have not wholly 

 vanished, w T ill remember the interest they once felt in watching their 

 shadows moving legs and arms and fingers, and observing how cor- 

 responding parts of the shadows moved. By a child a shadow is 

 thought of as an entity. I do not assert this without evidence. A 

 memorandum made in 1858, in elucidation of the ideas described in 

 the just-published book of Williams on the Feejeeans, concerns a little 



