ANIMAL AND PLANT LORE. 657 



"big girl." This is a most unique bit of child's reasoning, but 

 doubtless each of us can recall personal experiences, if less curi- 

 ous, no less to the purpose. Science is constantly extirpating errors 

 and uprooting old conceits, but meanwhile new ones or modified 

 forms of older ones arise ; thus, it has come about that some of 

 our New World zoological and botanical fables are of recent birth, 

 although very many, especially those that constitute connected 

 myths, are undoubtedly not indigenous, but, as the floras have it, 

 " naturalized from Europe " or " Asia." It would be a labyrinth- 

 ine task to attempt to trace out, even approximately, the birth and 

 development of some of the latter that still hold extended sway, 

 but many of them certainly are of very remote origin. 



There seems to be the best of reason for believing that, to seek 

 the origin of the popular delusion concerning the curative proper- 

 ties of certain animal excreta, we must study the mythology of 

 our long-ago Aryan ancestors. It would not be in keeping with 

 the object of the present paper to occupy the space necessary to 

 give more than a mere suggestion of the character of the great 

 pastoral poem that is embodied in the old Aryan myth which is 

 described in such interesting detail by De Gubernatis in his " Zoo- 

 logical Mythology." Probably every mythical or legendary ac- 

 count of the phenomena of Nature is more or less a mirrored reflec- 

 tion of the environment of its authors: so (as we might have 

 expected) we find that the character of the mythology developed 

 on that ancient Asiatic table-land, to which philologists and eth- 

 nologists now look back as to the source of the many branches of 

 the great Indo-European family, was a natural outgrowth of the 

 simple life led by the primitive herdsmen and farmers among 

 whom it arose. Dwelling amid abundant herds, which furnished 

 at once their occupation and their princij)al sustenance, in an at- 

 mosphere redolent of the breath of cattle, this pastoral race most 

 naturally transferred the names and attributes of these objects of 

 their daily care to the heavenly bodies and to various meteoro- 

 logical occurrences. The sky, for them, was peopled with cows 

 and bulls, and celestial phenomena were personified in language 

 which was already in daily use, in its literal sense. Thus arose a 

 whole system of zoological mythology, in which the animals rep- 

 resented and all pertaining to them bore symbolic meanings. A 

 literal interpretation of certain of these mythical beliefs gave rise 

 to " the superstitious Hindoo custom of purifying one's self by 

 means of the excrement of a cow." Later, the same custom passed 

 into ancient Iran, where the urine of various animals was made use 

 of in religious rites. How much stress the sacred books of the Par- 

 sees laid upon this mode of lustration may be gathered from the 

 brief account of the use of the " Nirang," as the liquid in question is 

 called, given in Max Miiller's " Chips from a German Workshop." 



VOL. XXXIII. — 42 



