2 20 TJlq Pods Beasts. 



The Greeks and Romans, when they hunted him — 

 " Adonis' bane " — took extraordinary precautions for their 

 personal safety. They went in large parties, keeping 

 together, and were attended by the largest and fiercest 

 hounds — Locrian, Spartan, or Cretan. Nets were carried 

 with them to throw over the brute, and the javelins used 

 were of a specially murderous description. 



In metaphor the boar is singularly rare. Burns has a 

 "wild Scandinavian boar" that issued forth "to wanton in 

 carnage and wallow in gore," but, changing the beast in the 

 next line into the plural, " brave Caledonia in vain they 

 assailed, as Largs well can \vitness and Loncartie tell." In 

 Gray's " Bard" we find the English king "the bristled boar 

 that in infant gore wallows beneath the thorny shade ; " and 

 Dryden has a semi-domesticated hog as the type of the 

 Baptist — 



" Tlie bristled baptist boar, impure as he, 

 But whitened with the form of sanctity, 

 With fat poUutions filled the sacred place, 

 And mountains levelled in his furious race ; 

 •So first rebellion founded was in grace. 

 But since the mighty ravage which he made 

 In German forests had his guilt betrayed, 

 With broken tusks, and with a borrowed name, 

 lie shunned the veuLjcance and concealed the shame." 



Yet in folk-lore and myth it is a constantly recurring and a 

 very formidable figure. 



It is sacred to Scandinavian Thor, and drags the car 

 of Freyya, its bristles golden, its head refulgent. Vishnu 

 appears as the tusked one, the irresistible piercer ; and the 

 thunderbolts, the fathers of the winds, are red boars, 

 horned, bristled, and fierce. 



Once upon a time the Trinity of the Hindoos disputed 

 for supremacy. Brahma, seated on his lotus, could sec 

 nothing else in the universe, and so said to himself, " I ani 



