156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



doos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, and Germans, the story of the creation 

 corresponds with the picture afforded by the apparent new birth of 

 the workl after each storm.* 



There are those who have seen in myths simple metaphors con- 

 ceived by poets and taken seriously by their hearers. Thus, when 

 Pindar represents Excuse as the daughter of Reflection, when Prodicus 

 speaks of Hercules as the butt of two women who personify Pleasure 

 and Virtue, they give those images the sense that we ourselves would 

 attach to them ; but the figures are taken in earnest by the masses, and 

 so myth arises from metaphor and parable. With still more proba- 

 bility has some confusion of this kind resulted from changes of lan- 

 guage, when the appellations of objects personified in this way have 

 lost their primitive signification, and no longer suggest anything but 

 proper names. 



Some postulate besides this auricular mythology an ocular one, 

 holding that the origin of myths should be sought in uncomprehended 

 or badly interpreted drawings. Coins, cups, and primitive objects of 

 art in which emblems, personages, and real or fancied scenes are rep- 

 resented, have set the imagination at work of strangers who acquired 

 them, and they have tried to explain the figures by extemporized 

 legends. According to M. Clermont-Ganneau, the Chimaera and its 

 legend originated in a composition quite common on the Lycian monu- 

 ments, in which a lion appeared to be devouring a deer. The two 

 animals, if we should suppose them combined by an inexact or igno- 

 rant copyist, might in fact give the idea of a monster formed by an 

 amalgamation of the lion and the deer or goat. So the triple Geryon, 

 slain by Hercules, is found among the Egyptian monuments under the 

 form of three men kneeling before a victorious hero.f 



According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, the adventures attributed to 

 the celestial bodies and personified phenomena, to the sun, moon, sky, 

 twilight, etc., originally related to human beings bearing the names of 

 those bodies or phenomena as their heroes. Thus, a person who left a 

 living memory among following generations was called Aurora, be- 

 cause he was born at dawn, or for some other reason. Gradually he 

 became confounded with the dawn, and his adventures were inter- 

 preted in the way that the phenomena of the nascent day made most 

 plausible. Then, as the same name may have belonged to several per- 

 sons of different tribes and times, such a juxtaposition of contradictory 

 stories as we find in most mythologies would inevitably have been 

 brought about. I 



My conclusion is that there is truth in each of these theories, and 

 that they do not all exhaust the matter. The law of intellectual de- 

 velopment is one, but its combinations are infinite, and to seek to 



* J. Darmestcter, "Les Cosmogonies Aryenncs, Essais oricntaux," Paris, 1883. 

 f Ch. Clermont-Ganneau, " Mythologie Iconographiciuo," Paris, 18*78, pp. 9-12. 

 X Herbert Spencer, " Sociology," vol. ii, chap. xxiv. 



