THE PLANETS. 115 



This important passage explains the praise of the Pelasgian 

 Arcadia. 



I conclude these considerations respecting the distances of 

 the planets, and their arrangement in space, with a law, 

 which, however, scarcely deserves this name, and which is 

 called by Lalande and Delambre a play of numbers; by oth- 

 ers, a help for the memory. It has greatly occupied our la- 

 borious Bode, especially at the time that Piazzi discovered 

 Oeres : a circumstance, however, which was in no way occa- 

 sioned by that so-called law, but rather by a misprint in Wol- 

 iiston's Catalogue of the Stars. If any one is inclined to 

 consider that discovery as the fulfillment of a prediction, it 

 must not be forgotten that the latter, as we have already 

 pointed out, extends back as far as Kepler, or more than a 

 century and a half beyond Titius and Bode. Although the 

 Berlin astronomer had already distinctly declared, in the sec- 

 ond edition of his popular and extremely useful Anleitung 



tating old models, expresses himself quite in accordance with this pas- 

 sage where he says (iv., 261), Egypt is said to have been inhabited be- 

 fore all other countries ; ' the stars did not yet all revolve in the heavens; 

 the Danaides had not yet appeared, nor the race of Deucalion ; the Ar- 

 cadians alone existed ; those of whom it is said that they lived before 

 the Moon, eating acorns upon the mountains.' In the same manner, 

 Nonnus (xli.) says of the Syrian Bero6 that it was inhabited before the 

 time of the Sun. 



" Such a habit of deriving determinations of time from epochs in the 

 formation of the world is an offspring of the speculative period, in which 

 all objects have still more vitality, and is most closely allied to the gen- 

 ealogical local poetry ; so that it is not improbable that the tradition sung 

 by an Arcadian poet of the battle of the giants in Arcadia, to which the 

 above-quoted words of old Theodorus (whom some consider to be a 

 Samothracian, and whose work must have been very comprehensive"* 

 refer, may have given occasion to the general application of the epitnet 

 TT-poaiTirjvoi to the Arcadians." With regard to the double names 'Ar- 

 kades Pelasgoi,' and the opposition of a more ancient or recent peopling 

 of Arcadia, compare the excellent work Der Peloponnesos, by Ernst 

 Curtius, 1851, p. 160 and 180. In the New Continent, also, there is, 

 as I have already shown in another place (see my Kleinen Schrifien, 

 bd. i., p. 115), upon the elevated plain of Bogota, the race of JVIuyscas 

 or Mozcas, who in their historical myths boast of a proselenic antiquity. 

 The origin of the Moon is connected with the tradition of a great flood, 

 which a woman who accompanied the miracle-worker Botschika had 

 caused by her magical arts. Botschika drove away the woman (called 

 Huythaca or Schia). She left the Earth, and became the Moon, " which 

 until then had never shone upon the Muyscas." Botschika, pitying the 

 human race, opened a steep rocky wall near Canoas, where the Rio de 

 Tunzha now ruslies down, forming the famous waterfall Tequendama. 

 The valley, filled with water, was then laid dry— a geognostic romance 

 which occurs repeatedly : for example, in the closed Alpine valley of 

 Cashmir, where the mighty drainer is called Kasyapa. 



