Introduction. 5 



comes, counts without detecting the trick put upon 

 him, sleeps, and, while sleeping, is made prisoner, 

 for the men who have been waiting and watching 

 since daybreak for this moment do not fail to bestir 

 themselves to good purpose when it comes. 



In this way Proteus was out-witted and mastered ; 

 in this way, by the help of Eidothea and his comrades, 

 Menelaus got to know how it had fared with his un- 

 happy brother Agamemnon, and with Ulysses, and how, 

 if he himself would prosper, he must begin by paying 

 due honour to the gods to Neptune more especially. 



This is the myth in which Bacon detected the story 

 of matter, and in which more still may be found by 

 looking for it. And, certainly, the student of nature is 

 only following the example set by his great master, and 

 put on record in one of the ever-charming essays on 

 the " Wisdom of the Ancients," when he deals with it as 

 bearing directly upon his own studies, as being in truth 

 a real unveiling of the face of nature. 



The metamorphoses of Proteus, as Bacon points out, 

 may very well be supposed to set forth the transmut- 

 ations by which the same matter is made to serve 

 in building up an endless succession of dissimilar 

 creatures. They may show that there is, underlying all 

 these dissimilarities, that common archetypal form of 

 which Oken and Goethe and Geoffrey St. Hilaire and 

 Carus and Owen and others have had vivid glimpses. 

 They may symbolize the working of that law of unity 

 in multiety and multiety in unity about which Plato 

 discoursed so divinely. They may help to connect the 

 visible world with the invisible, for the power of trans- 

 figuration which belongs to Proteus belongs to Zeus and 

 the celestials generally. In a word, the metamorphoses- 

 may serve to teach much that must needs be learnt by him 

 who hopes to find the key to the hieroglyphics of nature. 



