DIVI BOTANIC!. 177 



Nowadays^ although it had obtained for centuries, the Chironia 

 has been transformed, by the spirit of ncological glossography, into 

 an Erylhrcea, the redling, for reasons the propriety of which is un- 

 apparent. IMany are the red-blossomed vegetables that make more 

 conspicuous Rcdlings than the plant which has ever been held in 

 hallowed estimation as the Herb of Chiron, since the days of old. 



Melampus. — Thirty-three centuries and more have completed 

 their irremeable courses since the times when Melampus " the Pro- 

 phet" overawed and benefited the early Peloponnesian tribes with 

 wonders produced by the applications of his skill in moral and me- 

 dicinal knowledge. Like the kings, priests and physicians of his 

 days, he was a shepherd, and employed the leisure afforded by a 

 pastoral life in pondering the system of terrestrial nature, and in 

 contemplating the sublime economy of the " Host of Heaven." 

 Wliile thus devoted to the noblest intellectual exercises, favoured 

 by seclusion and tranquillity, he regained that of the patriarchal 

 wisdom by what he was qualified to sustain, the venerated character 

 of a sage and a seer, and to secure for his name a glorious homage 

 in the gratitude of after-generations. 



This extraordinary personage appears, in ancient history, as the 

 son of Amythaon the son of Cretheus, who was king of lolchos at 

 the period when IMoses began to " keep the flock of Jethro his fa- 

 ther-in-law," amid the mountains of the Arabian wilderness. Re- 

 presented allegorically, Melampus had his dwelling-place at Pyios ; 

 and, while residing there, a knowledge of Poetry and Augury was 

 imparted to him by the Divinity, through the instrumentality of 

 serpents.* He descanted pathetically, in harmonious nurabers,t on 



" According to the apologue, Melampus had his ears gently hcked by two 

 serpents, while he was asleep during his infancy ; and, by means of this mys- 

 tical process, he received the gift of prophesying and that of interpreting the 

 " language of birds." This allegorical legend originated in the widely pre- 

 vailing belief, that these reptiles, which " were more subtle than any beasts 

 of the field," possessed the faculty of presaging the atmospheric changes and 

 the accessions of epidemical maladies. Hence it came, that the men of Argos 

 revered the serpentine race as the " natural masters of the divinatory sci- 

 ence," and never suffered one of them to be destroyed. 



t Melampus was one of those primeval Melodists, whose names have sur- 

 vived " the wreck of ages and the spoils of time :" the "divine" Homer re- 

 members him with marks of ajiprobation. He comjiosed many thousand 

 verses on the Sonowf of Ceres, on the Eleusiniaii Mi/nkTics, and on other 

 themes ; but all these have disajjpeared from the records of human action, 

 l-'roni Apollo he derived an unequalled insight into the secrets of Physick; 

 and, among the fooleries of modern " phisiognomers," there is a tract of 



