^ 



648 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



repeated one another endlessly.^ " For as though," wrote Sir Thomas 

 Browne, " there were a Metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed 

 into another, Opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds 

 like those that first begat them." 2 Now certain periodicities are swift 

 enough to be ordinary experiences and striking enough because of their 

 periodicity to have the arrestiveness of the unusual. The waxing and waning 

 of the moon was as familiar to primitive man as the fire that warmed his 

 hearth and also, in its steady periodic change, arrestive like the mysterious 

 eclipse that sent him trembling to his hut. It was too constant to stir as 

 violently as the eclipse, but its constancy, conjoined with an arrestiveness 

 like that of the unusual which periodicity secured, stirred him to a sense 

 of significance. 



The Kassena fear they may become weaker as the moon becomes larger, 

 and, for some obscure ritual reason, blow ashes towards the crescent of the 

 new moon.^ If they think that the waxing moon absorbs their strength to 

 supply its own growth they are an interesting exception to a very general 

 primitive belief which survives, as a still convinced or half-convinced 

 superstition or as a traditional amusement, whenever fingers turn a coin in 

 a pocket at the new moon : the moon is on the wax and wealth may wax 

 with it. The influence of the waxing moon in urging growth was one of 

 the first recipes for preventing baldness, for Tiberius, according to Pliny, 

 had his hair cut during the moon's increasing phases.* For an opposite 

 reason, doubtless, up to the Revolution wood was felled in France after the 

 full moon.^ Tiberius desired his hair to grow, so it was cut when the moon 

 waxed ; builders desired their wood to season by drying, so it wcis cut when 

 the moon waned. This belief in a connection between increasing or decreasing 

 moons and increase or decrease of aU kinds of growth penetrated deeply 

 and extensively into the primitive mind, producing a rich variety of customs 

 and rites and surviving in many superstitions. The sympathetic response 

 in growing things to the changes of the moon seems to have impressed itself 

 as decisively on the human mind as the belief in a circulating sun. 



The apparent journey of the sun round the earth depended on an obvious 

 sensible intuition, for the sun seems to our eyes, in spite of our knowledge 

 that it does not, to travel round us. Such a sensible intuition, a spontaneous 

 estimate springing from an appearance to the eye, shaped the mythical 

 thunderbolt. When a flash of lightning rends a tree or shatters a rock 

 or fells a hut there is an appearance of something thrown. The vivid flash 

 suggests a thing like a stone ; fires and flames, for early thought, were 

 flaming bodies, or, more definitely, the fire itself was a substantial thing. 

 Thus the thunderbolt, a fiery projectile thrown by Zeus, depends as con- 

 vincingly as the daily journey of the sun on a sensible intuition. The eye 

 sees and the mind forms a spontaneous estimate. If the mythical thunder- 

 bolt were a meteor flashing through the sky or a meteorite crashing on the 

 ground, a sensible appearance stirred a spontaneous comparison with the 

 missile of an angered God and the fearful soul saw, for it would seem in 

 very truth to see, an avenging act of Zeus. 



Some convincing experience probably compelled the inference that 

 growing things sympathetically responded to the changing moon, since the 

 belief is so widespread and so insistent. The inference probably did not 

 depend so directly on a sensible intuition, on an estimate that so directly 

 prolonged, so to speak, into an inference a simple act of seeing, as did the 



1 Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, bk. i, ch. iv. 



- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici. 



^ Cardinal!, loc. cit., p. 23. 



* Fox, Science Progress, 1922, 17, 273, " Lunar Periodicity in Living 

 Organisms." 



* Ibid., p. 274. 



