7 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



double fascicle of six or eight arrows, which, held between the 

 thumb and forefinger, is used by the lamas and bonzes in blessing 

 the faithful and exorcising demons. 



By the side of the improvements due to the aspirations of 

 artists must be placed the deformations produced by the ignorance 

 or unskillfulness of copyists. Sometimes a new type springs from 

 these deteriorations to succeed the old one in somewhat the same 

 manner as in the dissolving views, where the outlines of two pict- 

 ures succeeding one another are confounded into an indistinct 

 image which is neither one nor the other. The ansate cross of 

 the Egyptians seems thus to have engendered certain types of the 

 Ephesian Diana, with veiled face, arms half opened, and body in- 

 closed in a sheath ; as also the sacred triangle of the Semites, fre- 

 quently surmounted by a disk and two horizontal bars, inspired 

 in the Greeks, according to Francois Lenormant, representations 

 of Harmony or of Aphrodite under the form of a cone crowned 

 with a tiara and supplied with two rudimentary arms. As a 

 counterpart to these metamorphoses changing a linear symbol 

 into a representation of the human figure, may be cited some 

 images sculptured on the paddles of the New-Irelanders, which 

 were exhibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1872. 

 There was revealed in them a series of deformations gradually 

 changing a human face into a crescent couchant on the point of 

 an arrow. Except for the presence of the intermediate forms, no 

 one would have inferred the relationship of the extreme terms. 



When the symbol is composed of several images grouped to- 

 gether, there is no reason why it should not keep its physiognomy 

 as a whole, although one or more of its constituent elements may 

 be modified, the better to answer to the religious traditions, the 

 national preferences, and the geographical peculiarities of a new 

 medium. Thus the lily, as M. de Gubernatis remarks in his 

 Mythologie des Plantes, has taken the place of the lotus in the 

 symbolic combinations borrowed by the West from the East. 

 One of the most characteristic examples of these local variations 

 with persistence of the type is presented to us by the figured rep- 

 resentations of the sacred trees, in which we believe we can recog- 

 nize the tree of life which is mentioned in both the Semitic and 

 the Aryan traditions. From the most remote antiquity, the Chal- 

 deans gave it the appearance of the date-palm, sometimes attended 

 by a vine or an asclepiad similar to the plant that yields the soma 

 of the Hindoos. The Assyrians made of it a wholly conventional 

 tree, in which palm-leaves were associated with a cone-fruit, and 

 the horns of the wild goat formed a kind of capital to the trunk. 

 The Phoenicians exaggerated the artificial character of the repre- 

 sentation by grafting the flowers of the lotus upon it. The Greeks 

 introduced it into their ornamentation under the abbreviated 



