April 20, 1883.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



236 



civilised nomads to become fathers and founders of nations 

 that abide to this day. 



These being the facts to which language itself bears 

 witness, how was it possible for their mythologies, i.r., 

 their stock of notions about things, to remain unaflected 

 and secure of transmission w ithout organic change I The 

 myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with 

 ease as vehicles of new ideas ; their ancient meaning, 

 already faded, paled before the all-absorbing signilicance of 

 present facts. These were more potent realities than the 

 kisses of the dawn ; the human and the personal, in its 

 struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn 

 or purple eve with the sons of thunder ; and Homer's 

 music would long since have died away were Achilles' 

 " baneful wrath " but a passively told tale of the sun's grief 

 for the loss of the morning. 



In brief, the complex and varying influences which have 

 transformed the primitive myth, are the important factors 

 which the solar theorists have omitted in their attempted 

 solution of the problem. They have forgotten the part 

 which, to borrow a term from astronomy, " personal equa- 

 tion " has played. They have not examined myth in the 

 light of the liibtory of the race ; and the new elements 

 which it took into itself, while never wholly ridding itself 

 of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a 

 mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical 

 with their own method, they might have secured a vital 

 unity. 



To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks 

 were of Aryan stock, but when they arrived in Europe is 

 unknown. The period between their settlement and the 

 Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their 

 advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness 

 of intellectual life. They remembered not from what rock 

 they w-ere hewn, from what pit they were digged. The 

 nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since 

 changed their meteorolog'cal character, and appeared in 

 the likeness of men — or, at least, played very human 

 pranks on Olympus. In the Veda, the primitive nature 

 myth, although e.xalted and purified, is persistent; under 

 one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between 

 the darkness and the light ; Dyaus was still the bright 

 «ky, the cattle of Siva were still the clouds. But the 

 Greek of Homer's time, and his congener in the far 

 north, had forgotten all that ; the war in heaven was 

 transferred to the strife of gods and men on the 

 shores of the Hellespont and by the bleak seaboard of the 

 Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age and ex- 

 perience, put off their pliysical and put on the ethical ; the 

 Heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of 

 order, law and justice ; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and 

 Athene, became wisdom, skill, and guardianship incarnate. 

 And the story of human vicissitudes found in solar 

 myth that " pattern of things in the heavens " which 

 conformed to its design. Thus Homer, in whose day 

 the old nature-myth had become confused with the 

 ▼ague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes 

 hut dimly remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire 

 nnquenchal)le. The siege of Troy, so say the solar 

 mythologists, "is a repetition of the daily siege of the east 

 by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their 

 highest treasures in the west." It is surely with a truer 

 instinct that while we contend for that physical origin of 

 the great epics to which their remarkable agreement 

 witnesses, we also feel that the vitality which inheres 

 in them is due to whatever of human experience, joy, 

 and sorrow are the burden of their immortal song. 

 As to the repulsive features of Greek myth, one 

 can neither share the distress of the solar theorists 



nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and 

 are aggravated by the assumption of "periods of tem- 

 porary insanity through which tlie human mind had to pass," 

 as the rude health of childhood is checked by whooping- 

 cough and measles. They are explained by the persistence 

 with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts 

 itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later 

 strata. The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the 

 remote past, and the " old Adam " was never entirely cast 

 out; indeed, it is with us still. There are superstitions and 

 credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as gipsy 

 camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as 

 those extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our 

 time, as he turns over the piles of our newspapers, will find 

 contrasts of ignorance and culture in our midst as startling 

 as any existiug in the land of Homer, of Archimedes, and 

 Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the " evil eye " 

 have their cult among us, although Professor Huxley's 

 " Hume " can be bought for two shillings, and knowledge 

 has free course. And it certainly accords best with all 

 that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to 

 believe that the old lived into the new, than that the old 

 had been cast out, but had gained re-entry, making the 

 last state of the Greeks to be worse than the first. 



In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much 

 They are the products of a relatively highly-civilised time; 

 the concepticin of sky and dawn as living persons has 

 passed out of its primitive simplicity ; these heavenly powers 

 have become complex deities ; there is much confounding 

 of persons — the same god called by one or many names. 

 The thought is that of an age when moral problems have 

 presented themselves for solution, and the references to 

 social matters indicate a settled state of things far re- 

 moved from the fisher and the hunter stage. Neverthe- 

 less, there lurk within these sacred writings survivals of 

 the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody sacrifices, 

 of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar 

 to the student of barbaric nijth and legend. 



Enough has been said to show that the extreme and 

 one-sided interpretations of the solar theorists are due 

 to a one-sided method. The philological has yielded 

 splendid results; this they have done; the historical 

 yields results equally rich and fertile ; this they have left 

 undone. Language has given us the key to the kinship 

 between the several members of the great body of Aryan 

 myths ; the study of the historical evolution of myths, the 

 comparison of these, without regard to affinity of speeeh, 

 will give us the key to the kinship between savage inter- 

 pretation of phenomena all the world over. The mytho- 

 logy of Greek and Bushman, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, 

 of the lied man and the Hindu, springs from the like 

 mental condition. It is the uniform and necessary product 

 of the human mind in the childhood of the race. 



Ax extraordinary run was recently made by an engine 

 attached to one of the steam dynamos in the Edison 

 Central Station, Pearl- street. New York, which ran for 

 seventeen days and nights successively, with a load varying 

 from a minimum of 40-horse power to a ma.ximum of 

 150 horse power indicated. The engine which accom- 

 plished this feat is a " Lawrence " direct-acting high-speed 

 engine, running at 350 revolutions per minute. If we 

 suppose the engine to have had a 5-feet driving-wheel 

 attached, this performance would have been equivalent to 

 that of a locomotive making the circuit of the globe at 

 the equator. The bearings of the engine when stopped 

 were not found to be unduly heated. 



