168 THE FLORiL WOELD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



tions are. The egg becomes a grub or caterpillar ; this changes to 

 a chrysalis, and in due time the beautiful butterfly comes forth. The 

 history is one of the most sublimely poetical that we shall find in 

 the great book of Nature. To the Christian it may represent the 

 resurrection and glorified life to which man is destined ; to the 

 classical scholar it is full of fanciful suggestions^ the most attractive 

 of all being the fable of Psyche. In the paper to which reference 

 Las been made above, Dr. Deakin says : — Great learning and labo- 

 rious research have been bestowed by many men in the endeavour to 

 trace out the origin of this myth ; but nothing appears to be really 

 known of it anterior to the time of Apuleius, who lived, it is be- 

 lieved, towards the close of the second century of the Christian era. 

 In his work, ' The Metamorphosis,' the title of which was after- 

 wards changed to that of ' The Golden Ass;' not, however, it is 

 thought, by the author himself, but probably on account of its 

 affinity to Lucien's story of ' The Ass,' the epithet of ' golden ' 

 being added as a mark of admiration. The episode of Psyche is 

 introduced in the latter part of the fourth book, and it is continued 

 in the fifth and sixth ; but the simplicity of the myth, as no doubt 

 it was in its original state, is here greatly distorted by many puerili- 

 ties and absurdities. 



The origin of this symbolical fable may be traced back to a 

 period much anterior to the time of Apuleius, especially through the 

 medium of ancient gems. 



The ancient Egyptians likened the supposed renewal of the 

 earth after the flood, and the return of Time, to a second infancy ; 

 and depicted the renovation of the world under the emblem of a 

 child, and called him Eros, that is to say. Love. Hesiod, in his 

 ' Theogony,' 1. 120, in alluding to the state of Nature after the 

 deluge, says : ' First Chaos was produced, then Tellus, then Love, 

 the most beautiful of the gods ; Love the soother and softener, 

 who relaxed the weary limbs.' Aristophanes, in his comedy of the 

 ' Birds,' 1. 695, says, in his poetical language of the same event, 

 ' Sable-winged night then produced an egg, whence sprouted up, 

 like a blossom, Eros, the lovely and desirable, with his glossy golden 

 wings.' Love is here used emblematic of the divine mercy for the 

 human race. The Greeks introduced as its companion, the personi- 

 fication of the soul, originally in the form of the aurelia, or butter- 

 fly. Plutarch, in the second book of his ' Symposiacon,' says : ' A 

 clarysalis, after being stiffened and cracked from dryness, emits 

 through its opening a second animal with wings, which is called 

 Psyche.' 



' The winged animal,', Mrs. Strutt says,* ' thus designated by 

 Plutarch under the name of Psyche, the word by which the Greeks 

 expressed likewise the soul, is in all probability that which ^lian 

 calls Pyraustes (TlvpavcTTyjs), a word denoting the attractive influ- 

 ence which light or fire exercises upon the moth. This truth in 



* A very beautiful and talented work, "The Story of Psyche, with a Classical 

 Inquiry into die Signification and Origin of the Fable," by Elizabeth Strutt ; with 

 designs in outline by John Gibson, Esq , E.A. ; to which we are chiefly indebted 

 for the remarks here made in allusion to the fable. 



