CHAPTEE XXXVI. 



Seaweed as a Fertiliser Homer, Horace, Virgil November Meteors Gaelic Folk-Lore 

 A Curfew Prayer A Bed Blessing A Cattle Blessing Rhyme to be said in driving 

 Cattle to Pasture " Luath," Cuchullin's Dog Notes from the Outer Hebrides. 



FROM a utilitarian point of view, at least, the ancients seem to 

 have looked upon the sea and all its products exclusive, of course, 

 of its myriad inhabitants of finny tribes as absolutely worthless. 

 Homer in the Iliad constantly speaks of the sea as " unfertile," 

 albs atrugetoio, literally, the ocean where no harvest can be 

 gathered ; and Horace in one of his satires says that a man may be 

 possessed of all the virtues, and all the accomplishments, &c. to 

 boot, but if yet sine re without means, moneyless, or to use, 

 perhaps, the best equivalent that our language can afford, without 

 substance he shall be accounted " vilior alga" viler than seaweed, 

 or, as we should say, viler than the dust on which he treads. Even 

 Virgil in the Georgics has no good word for the sea as in any ' 

 sense, directly or indirectly, subservient to husbandry, or an ally to 

 the tiller of the ground. Had these master-poets of Greece and 

 Eome, gentle reader, lived with us here in Nether Lochaber, in the 

 seventh decade of the nineteenth century, they would have thought 

 and said differently. Homer would have probably selected a more 

 appropriate epithet than that constantly employed by him ; Horace 

 would have cast about for some other fitting dissyllable as a sub- 

 stitute for " alga ;" and Virgil would have written, as he alone 

 could write, a score or two of unexceptionable hexameters in praise 

 of seaweed as an excellent manure and fertiliser of the soil. " It is 



