6-3 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Good Shepherd in the Catacombs, we can not escape the convic- 

 tion that, in significance if not in form, it proceeds from a single 

 source. This assertion seems to be confirmed in the class of 

 monuments in which it is met. It appears, in fact, from pre- 

 historic times among the people originating in the basin of the 

 Danube, who colonized on either hand the shores of the Troad 

 and of northern Italy ; thence it extends, with the products of 

 that ancient civilization, on one side to the Greeks, Etruscans, 

 Latins, Gauls, Germans, Bretons, and Scandinavians, and on the 

 other side to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Persia, India, and finally 

 to China and Japan. 



It is not always necessary, for two figures to have the same 

 origin, that they should have the same primitive signification. 

 Sometimes it happens that a symbol changes its meaning in 

 changing its country. It may possibly preserve only a general 

 value as a talisman or amulet, like those crucifixes, degraded into 

 fetiches, which are the only vestiges of the Christianity left among 

 certain tribes of the Congo by the Portuguese domination of the 

 last century. Sometimes, again — especially in the case of an 

 image proper — its new possessors will seek to explain it to them- 

 selves by some more or less ingenious interpretation, and will thus 

 restore to it a symbolical bearing, although by means of a new 

 conception. The rising sun has often been compared to a new- 

 born child. The comparison led the Egyptians to represent Horus 

 as a child sucking its finger. The Greeks fancied that he was put- 

 ting his finger to his lips to admonish the initiated to be discreet, 

 and made of the representation a figure of Harpocrates, the god 

 of silence. 



Such changes of sense may also be reconciled with knowledge 

 of the primitive significance. It is a pleasant thing to find every- 

 where the image or idea we are fond of. The Neo-Platonists be- 

 lieved in good faith that they could distinguish representations 

 of their own doctrines in the symbols as well as in the myths of 

 all the contemporary religions. The early Christians saw a cross 

 in every figure that presented an intersection of lines — in the 

 anchor, the mast and its yard, the standard, the plow, the man 

 swimming, the bird flying, the praying man with outstretched 

 arms, the paschal lamb on the spit, and the human face, where 

 the line of the nose is crossed by that of the eyes. When the 

 Serapeum at Alexandria was demolished, the Christian authors of 

 the time related that a number of ansated crosses were found. 

 They themselves observed that the figures were the same as the 

 ancient Egyptian symbol of life, but that did not keep them from 

 seeing in them a prophetic allusion to the sign of the redemption. 

 Sozomenus adds that the fact provoked numerous conversions 

 among the pagans. 



