434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of Ismail, father of the faithful ; wilt thou suffer one of thy creat- 

 ures to perish thus of thirst and fatigue ? ' 



" And it came to pass that, hardly had the dervish spoken, 

 when an abundant dew descended upon him, quenching his thirst 

 and refreshing him even to the marrow of his bones. 



" Now at the sight of this miracle the gardener knew that the 

 dervish was a holy man, beloved of Allah, and straightway of- 

 fered him a melon. 



" ' Not so/ answered Hadji Abdul- Aziz, ' keep what thou hast, 

 thou wicked man. May thy melons become as hard as thy heart, 

 and thy field as barren as thy soul ! ' 



"And straightway it came to pass that the melons were 

 changed into these blocks of stone, and the grass into this sand, 

 and never since has anything grown thereon/' 



In this story, and in myriads like it, we have a survival of that 

 early conception of the universe in which so many of the leading 

 moral and religious truths of the great sacred books of the world 

 are imbedded. 



All ancient sacred lore abounds in such mythical explanations 

 of remarkable appearances in nature, and these are most fre- 

 quently prompted by mountains, rocks, and bowlders seemingly 

 misplaced. 



In India we have such typical examples among the Brahmans 

 as the mountain-peak which Durgu threw at Parvati ; and among 

 the Buddhists the stone which Devadatti hurled at Buddha. 



In Greece the Athenian, rejoicing in his belief that Athena 

 guarded her chosen people, found it hard to understand why the 

 great rock Lycabettus should be just too far from the Acropolis 

 to be of use as an outwork ; but a myth was developed which ex- 

 plained all. According to this, Athena had intended to make 

 Lycabettus a defense for the Athenians, and she was bringing it 

 through the air from Pallene for that very purpose ; but, unfor- 

 tunately, a raven met her and informed her of the wonderful 

 birth of Erichthonius, which so surprised the goddess that she 

 dropped the rock where it now stands. 



So, too, a peculiar rock at JEgina was accounted for by a long 

 and circumstantial legend to the effect that Peleus threw it at 

 Phocas. 



A similar mode of explaining such objects is seen in the my- 

 thologies of northern Europe. In Scandinavia we constantly find 

 rocks which tradition accounts for by declaring that they were 

 hurled by the old gods at each other, or at the early Christian 

 churches. 



In Teutonic lands, as a rule, wherever a strange rock or stone 

 is found, there will be found a myth or a legend, heathen or 

 Christian, to account for it. 



