THE PLANETS. 439 



p. 557, note,) extends the flood as far as the Getulean 

 mountains of Northern Africa. Apollonius Rhodius, who 

 according to Alexandrian custom, was fond of imitating old 

 models, speaks of the early colonization of the Egyptians in 

 the valley of the Nile : " the stars did not yet revolve in the 

 heavens ; nor had the Danaides yet appeared, or the race 

 of Deucalion." ** This important passage explains the praise 

 of the Pelasgian Arcadia. 



30 Since the explanations which Heyne has given of the 

 origin of the astronomical myth of the Proselenes, so widely 

 diffused in antiquity (De Arcadibus Luna Antiquioribus, in 

 Opusc. AcacL vol. ii. p. 332,) were unsatisfactory to me, I 

 was greatly rejoiced to receive from my acute philological 

 friend, Professor Johannes Franz, a new and very happy 

 solution of this much-debated problem, by simple combi- 

 nations of ideas. This solution is unconnected with either 

 the arrangement of the calendar by the Arcadians, or their 

 worship of the Moon. I restrict myself here to an extract 

 from an unpublished and more extended work. This expla- 

 nation will not be unwelcome to some of my readers in a work 

 in which I have made a rule frequently to trace back the 

 whole of our present knowledge to the knowledge of the 

 ancients, and even to traditions believed generally or by very 

 many. 



" We shall commence with a few of the principal passages 

 from the ancients, which treat of the Proselenes. Stephanus 

 of Byzantium (v. 'A/W?) mentions the logographs of Hippys, 

 of Rhegium, a contemporary of Darius and Xerxes, as the 

 first who called the Arcadians wpoaeKrjvovs. The scholiasts, ad 

 Apollon. Rhod. IV. 264, and ad Aristoph. Nub. 397, agree in 

 saying, the remote antiquity of the Arcadians becomes most 

 clear from the fact of their being called 7rpo<re\r)voi. They 

 appear to have been there before the Moon, as Eudoxus and 

 Theodoras also say ; the latter adds that it was shortly before 

 the labours of Hercules that the Moon appeared. .In the 

 government of the Tegeates, Aristotle states that the bar- 

 barians who inhabited Arcadia were driven out by the later 

 Arcadians before the Moon appeared, and therefore they 

 were called 7rpoae\i]voi. Others say, Endymion discovered 

 the revolution of the Moon, but as he was an Arcadian, his 



