234 



KNOWLEDGE 



[April 20, 1883, 



another wealthy Rochesterian has given a sidereal clock ; 

 so that, altogctlicr, the institution is splendidly equipped, 

 and Dr. Swift, tlie director, will certainly lack nothing in 

 the way of facilities for making astronomical discoveries. 



In the drawing-room of the Observatory Dr. Swift has 

 a large album containing the photographs of all the pro- 

 fessional and non-professional astronomers of America, and 

 he tells me he hopes to obtain the photographs of all the 

 European astronomers for the Observatory. 



Mr. 11. II. Warner, the donor of this magnificent in- 

 stitution, is l)ut forty years of age. His ancestors belong 

 to the Warner family of Kent and Essex, several of whose 

 members emigrated to this country in the seventeenth 

 century, and settled in the New England States. His 

 maternal ancestors came over in the Mayjhnrer. Twelve 

 years ago he came to Rochester with less than £20 in his 

 pocket. To-day he is one of the wealthiest men in the 

 city. In 1872 he took the general agency for the whole 

 United States of a well-known fire and burglar-proof safe, 

 and since then has sold over G0,000 safes, and made, and 

 lost, and made again, a handsome fortune. His career has 

 been almost phenomenal. He was not regarded when a 

 boy as extraordinarily capable, but he felt his own 

 power, and when labouring at the uninteresting work of a 

 farmer upon his father's estate, he vowed to himself that 

 he would write his name high on the scroll of commercial 

 success, and he has done it. There is not to-day a better- 

 known manufacturer in America than H. H. Warner. 

 Last June, in recognition of his generosity to science, the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, at 

 its Montreal session, elected him a member. In 1881, he 

 oflFered a Comet prize of $200 in gold for each American 

 or Canadian discovery of a telescopic rmexpeoted comet. 

 During the same year he gave a prize of .§200 in gold for 

 the best essay on comets, which was won by Mr. Lewis 

 Bos9, director Dudley Observatory, Albany, New York, 

 U.S.A., whose essay is said to be one of the finest mono- 

 graphs ever written on comets. The previous year he gave 

 Prof. Swift $.500 for his cometary finds. In 1882 he 

 renewed his §200 prize for cometary discoveries in the 

 United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and established 

 a prize of .$200 for each meteoric stone with organic 

 remains, and §.')0 for each meteoric stone without organic 

 remains, seen to fall in Canada or the United States during 

 the year. Fifteen hundred dollars have been awarded by 

 him under these prizes, during the past two years. 



He not only built, fitted, and furnished the Warner 

 Observatory, but he maintains Dr. Lewis Swift in his posi- 

 tion as director, on a handsome salary. 



As an indication of the large place this man fills in the 

 American commercial world, it may be noted that he is pre- 

 sident and heaviest stockholder in the Rochester Grape 

 Sugar Company, having a capital of 1,000,000 dels. ; is 

 director of the Horse Shoe Silver Mining Company, 

 having a capital of 1,000,000 dels. ; is the heaviest 

 dealer in safes in the United States, having done 

 last year 800,000 dols. worth of business ; and his Safe 

 Kidney and Liver Cure establishment did between two and 

 three million dollars worth of business in 1882. And this 

 is the record of twelve years of the hardest kind of hard 

 work under the most discouraging circum-stances. He has 

 emphatically commanded success by deserving it Besides 

 his benevolence to science, he is a man of large charity, of 

 generous, undemonstrative nature, and is highly esteemed 

 in this city of his home. 



You will pardon my particularity in portraying his 

 successes; I fanced it would not be without interest to 

 your readers, as one illustration of the phenomenal growth 

 of fortune in this new and wide-awake country. 



Dr. Swift's successes in astronomical discovery have had 

 a local inspiration, and during the past two years the 

 section of astronomy of the Academy of Sciences has been 

 in active operation. There are about a dozen private tele- 

 scopes now owned by the members, and there is not a clear 

 night in the year when the skj' is not diligently searched 

 for old and new astronomical facts, within the horizon of 

 Rochester. The Rochester Astronomical Society, an 

 organisation in connection with the Warner Observatory, 

 al.so sends out announcements by mail and telegraph to all 

 the papers of the country of all astronomical discoveries; 

 and Mr. Warner also generously bears the expense of these 

 bulletins. 



THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 



VI. 



By Edward Clodd. 



IN a former paper, the facts on which the solar theory 

 rests were summarised as witnessing to its inherent 

 soundness, and we must now glance at certain other facts 

 which are overlooked by its exponents. A needful task ; 

 because the claims preferred on its behalf to explain every 

 incident in the complex mythology of the Greek ai;d other 

 races has caused a recoil in minds otherwise well disposed 

 towards it. In fact, any one reading, without such caution 

 as this paper is designed to supply, the iLinute analyses of 

 myths in the writings of those who interpret them solely 

 by the philological method, would conclude that it 

 had laid bare the meteorological origin of every epic 

 and folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He 

 would learn that in a way rudely analogous to the super- 

 natural guidance of the Christian Church, the several 

 Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an 

 unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, 

 a canon preserved with the jealous veneration with which 

 the Jew regarded the Thorah and the Brahman the Veda. 

 He would also learn that the details of Norse and classic 

 myth can be traced to the Veda, that these details, not of 

 incident alone, but of thought and expression, survived 

 unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, 

 strange to say, the more prominent names and the leading 

 characters became obscured in their meaning. Strange 

 indeed, but not true. For what is the fact ? 



Long before the hymns of the Rig-Veda existed as we 

 know them (and they have remained an inviolate sacred 

 text since 600 b c, when every word, verse, and syllable 

 were counted), the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their 

 parent hive across boundless ste^ppes and over winding 

 mountain passes, some westward into Europe, others south- 

 ward into Hindustan. Among the slender intellectual 

 capital of which they stood possessed was the common 

 mythology of their ancestors, in which, as we have 

 seen, sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and 

 all other natural phenomena, were credited with 

 personal life and will. But that mythology had cer- 

 tainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and 

 entered the heroic stage, wherein the powers of nature 

 were half human, half divine. Their language had passed 

 into the inflective, or highest stage, and had undergone 

 such changes that the relationship between its several 

 groups and their origin from one mother-tongue were ob- 

 scured and remained so until laid bare in our day. In 

 short, the Ai'yan tribes had attained no mean state of 

 civilisation, some being more advanced than the others, 

 according as external circumstances helped or hindered, 

 and, one by one, they passed from the condition of semi- 



