260 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



inundations, succeed one another with lamentable regularity in Bengal. 

 The cholera-plague has its home in the delta of the Ganges ; and in the 

 devastating Indian pestilence of Rajastan, characterized by gangrene 

 of the lungs, Hirsch recognizes the black death of the middle ages, the 

 Florentine pestilence described by Boccaccio, which, like cholera in our 

 times, held its ghastly circuit through the world. 



In the face of such aspects of Nature as these, asks Buckle, which 

 are ever menacing him with annihilation, must not man feel himself 

 small and powerless ? He arrives at no conscious, reasoned conclusion, 

 but stolidly fancies to himself certain dominant and unfriendly powers 

 as the authors of these dire calamities. He deifies the objects of his 

 fears, erects altars to them, and offers to them sacrifice. 1 Hence it is 

 that Hindoo mythology teems with monstrosities. Men there live 100,- 

 000 years. The ages of the world are reckoned by units followed by 

 sixty -three zeros. The god Siva, who constitutes with Brahma and 

 Vishnu the Indian trinity, is a monster with three eyes, wearing a neck- 

 lace of human bones and a girdle of serpents. In one hand he holds a 

 skull; a tiger's skin is his mantle ; and over his left shoulder the deadly 

 cobra rears its head. His wife Doorga is represented as of a blue com- 

 plexion, with gory hands, lolling tongue, four arms, a giant's skull in 

 one hand, a necklace of human heads; round her waist are the hands of 

 her victims. All Hindoo deities are in like manner characterized by 

 some inhuman or monstrous aspect for instance, an excess of limbs or 

 an unnatural complexion. 



Buckle thinks he finds in Central America evidences of a like in- 

 fluence npon man's religious ideas of the dangers of life in tropical 

 regions. The traveler Kennan refers the Shamanism of the inhabitants 

 of the Siberian steppe to the dismal aspects of Nature by which they 

 are surrounded. Alone on the toondra with his herd of reindeer, watch- 

 ing in the glare of the northern lights the howling wolves round about, 

 the Korak stands on guard through the polar night, and fancies him- 

 self to be beleaguered by evil spirits, whose wrath he seeks to conjure 

 away by offering to them his dogs, or by the practice of magic arts. 2 It 

 needs not to be told how fully the gloomy sublimity of the Eddas 

 accords in the same sense with the aspects of Nature in Iceland, where 

 volcanic forces are ever striving with ice for the upper hand. 



As contrasting with these aspects of Nature and the religions which 

 owe to them their origin, Buckle points to the tamer and more pleasing 

 scenery of Greece, and thence would infer the humanly beautiful 

 character of the Hellenic mythology. With its multitudinous promon- 

 tories, forming landlocked harbors, and itself surrounded by a number 

 of beauteous islands, Hellas rises out of the Mediterranean, bearing 



ber of victims is 20,000. (See also Sir James Paget apud Archibald Dickson, " The Vivi- 

 section Question," London, 1877, p. 38.) 



1 See Edmund Burke's lumen dicendi in the proceedings against Warren Hastings 

 apud Macaulay, " Critical and Historical Essays," vol. iv. 



s "Tent-Life in Siberia," New York, Putnams, 1870, p. 209. 



