77 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



such subterfuges as club-room arrangements, treating, exchange, 

 barter, etc.), there might be some pretense that it is expense to the 

 drinker which the Iowa law originally intended to prevent. But 

 this can not be the object when the drinker is at no expense. And 

 so the very statute preventing evasions assailed by Dr. Hammond 

 goes to overthrow his contention, since the reason for preventing 

 them can not be "sumptuary." There is an old saying about 

 hoisting one's self with " his own petard." 



«•» 



THE MIGRATION OF SYMBOLS. 



By the COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA. 



II. 



SYMBOLS may differ in aspect and yet be connected with one 

 another by a more or less direct affiliation. This thought 

 leads us to examine the causes which may change the forms of 

 symbolical representations. There is first a tendency to reduce or 

 simplify the figure, in order to confine it to a smaller space or to 

 diminish the labor of the artist — especially when the figure is 

 complicated and frequently used. In all the systems of writing 

 in which the characters began as hieroglyphics, we have only to 

 scratch the letter to find the hieroglyphic symbol. Thus our 

 vowel A was originally the head of an ox, and that in its turn 

 represented the whole animal, according to the popular rule that 

 in symbols and sacrifices a part may stand for the whole. So, 

 likewise, in the signs of the zodiac, the lion is simply represented 

 by his tail. At other times, again, additions and embellishments 

 are dictated by aesthetic considerations. That was the case with 

 most of the symbols adopted by Greece, whose art, so strongly 

 original, never adopted foreign types without impressing pro- 

 found and felicitous modifications upon them. 



The caduceus did not always present the classical form of two 

 serpents symmetrically entwined around a winged rod. On the 

 oldest monuments it is a stick the knotty head of which forks 

 into two branches that curve round till they recross one another, 

 then diverge and approach again, so as to form a figure 8 placed 

 at the end of a rod and open at the top. The poems of Homer 

 disclose to us an epoch still more remote, when a simple flowering 

 rod with three leaves was attributed to Mercury. In seeking an 

 explanation of these transformations, we suppose that the first in 

 date was probably due to the influence of the Phoenicians, who 

 left on their steles, especially in Libya, the representation of nu- 

 merous caduceuses formed of a circle placed upon a stick and sur- 

 mounted by a crescent. It is open to discussion whether the sec- 



