346 A TEIAD OF MEDLEVAL MYTHS. 



upas. The sap only of that tree is poisonous, not the emana- 

 tions of it. However, there does happen to exist in Java a 

 certain deep excavation or valley, about half a mile across, 

 and it is filled with heavy mephitic gas, probably sulphuretted 

 hydrogen.* No animal can enter that valley and live. Where- 

 fore bones are strewn all about, and carcasses lie rotting. 

 The accumulated mortality of ages has made this valley hor- 

 rible to gaze upon. 



What we now call choke-damp in mines, especially coal- 

 mines, is nothing else than an accumulation of carbonic acid 

 gas. If breathed, it kills on the instant ; and before pneu- 

 matic chemistry had come to be what it is, the fatal result 

 would have been charged to the gaze of some basilisk. Now 

 it so happens that toads will live in atmospheres so poisonous 

 that man breathing them would die. Putting all these facts 

 together, the basilisk mystery stands revealed ; fiction is de- 

 prived of a fable, and science has gained some facts. 



VAMPIRES. 



SPECULATING on the use and misuse of words, an in- 

 quirer after truth may, without equivocation, reasonably 

 doubt whether the word 6 supernatural' has any real sig- 

 nificance. If Mr. William Howitt should see as he so 

 often has seen three-legged tables dance fandangoes ; if 

 he should hear as he often has heard soft music dis- 

 coursed by harmoniums touched by invisible hands; if Mr. 

 Home, defying gravitation, should ascend to the ceiling and 

 flit about as he so often has done I do not know that 

 anybody has more right to call these things supernatural, 



* Sulphuretted hydrogen (or hydrosulphuric acid) is not a light gas, as 

 I have seen stated in more than one popular book, but a heavy gas. Its 

 specific gravity is nearly one and one-fifth (taking air as unity), or exactly 

 1-1798. 



