DIVI BOTANICr. 17-^ 



struction to many eminent disciples ; but, beyond all tiic rest, 

 Achilles, Hercules, Peleus, Jason, Aristseus, Theseus, Ulysses, IMa- 

 cliaon, Podalirius, ^neas and Jilsculapius, were the most illustrious. 

 Poetic history first recognizes the countrymen of Chiron as a 

 tribe of herdsmen sojourning among the romantic uplands of Thes- 

 saly. By whatever name this people was designated in the Thessa- 

 lian dialect, it has been immemorially known to the scholar skilled 

 in Hellenic lore as a tribe of Centaurs* or bull-prickers, who hunted 

 wild bulls on horseback, and tamed them to rural purposes, using 

 goads as the instruments with which these powerful animals were 

 subdued, and directed in the operations of pasturage and husbandry. 

 Equally famous were this ingenious people and its chieftains for 

 being the first to undertake the arduous enterprize of training war- 

 horses and of managing them in battle, with terrible and destruc- 

 tive advantage over their antagonists. While they formed a new 

 and distant object, the athletic Cenl auric archer and his steed would 

 appear, to the fears or the fancies of alien tribes, as one prodigious 

 animal ; and, thus excited by amazement, the wild enthusiasm of 

 Ideality in their painters, sculptors and poets, forthwith engendered 

 the formidable Monster, half-man half-horse, which constituted an 

 expressive mystification of the dexterity and courage that should 

 justly elevate the Centaurs of Thessaly to the praiseworthy dis- 

 tinction of having been the earliest equestrian knights, the intrepid 

 Fathers of Chivalry. 



Chiron was styled the " Herbipotent" and " Macida: Doctor,'' 

 from his practical acquaintance with the properties of herbs, and his 

 judgment in their administration ; for his love of justice and hospi- 

 tality, he was revered as " Senex Observalissimus Mqui," the most 

 upright and generous of his cloud-begottent kindred : and, after his 

 death, from a wound accidentally inflicted by a poisoned arrow, his 

 proficiency in the astronomical mysteries was gratefully acknow- 

 ledged by his translation into one of the zodiacal signs, in the figure 



• Centaurs. Kivrav^n, eo named -ra^a ro xmnTv Tous Tau^ous from their jirac- 

 ticc of pricking or goading bulls when training them for labour, or managing 

 tlieni on their pasture-grounds. They were worsted, in a drunken squabble, 

 b}' the I,apitha?, a clan of their countrymen ; and, having insulted Hcrcule?, 

 they were exterminated by that hero as he was going to hunt the Eryman- 

 tliian Boar. 



■f Nephele means a clovd, htcrally : it was a mountain of Tiicssaly, where 

 the Centaurs resided ; and, being an upland pastoral region, it was often 

 enveloped in clouds. Hence, from this natural feature ol' liie climate, llie 

 l'"al)lc was fabricated — that the Centaurs were the progeny of Ixion by .Juno, 

 wlio adnutled his embraces under the form of a cloud ! 



