May 13, 1873) 
NATURE 
43 
an “Ohm” or two the apparent stiffness of some of the 
paragraphs, so as to render the book more suitable to the 
capacities of the “ Microfarads ” of the present day. 
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY 
Zoological Mythology; or, the Legends of Animals. By 
Angelo De Gubernatis, Professor of Sanskrit and Com- 
parative Literature in the Istituto di Studii Superiori 
e di Perfezionamento at Florence. 2 vols. (London: 
Triibner and Co., 1872.) 
HE claims which these volumes make to our con- 
sideration as students of Nature is that their stories 
of birds, beasts, and fishes are treated as being Natural 
History, not indeed in an ordinary, but in an extra- 
ordinary sense. It is asserted that they are descrip- 
tions in mythical language of the great phenomena of the 
earth and sky. To no small extent this assertion is in- 
disputably true. In ancient poetry or story, it often 
happens that the teller of a myth incidentally lets us 
know what his underlying meaning is. Thus many a 
passage from the Veda shows that the minds of that 
poetic race of herdsmen, the ancient Aryans, were so 
moulded to the dominant ideas of the pasture and the 
stall, that they saw throughout all heaven and earth the 
analogues of their beloved herds. The winds chasing 
the clouds seem, to their fancy, bulls rushing among the 
cows. The sky is a beneficent cow, giving rain for milk. 
Indra, the Heaven-god, is a bull of bulls, whose horns 
are the thunderbolts, who smites in storm the mountain 
cavern where the cloud-cows are imprisoned, and sets 
them free. The sun may be fancied a herdsman, as in this 
ancient Vedic riddle : “ I have seen a shepherd who never 
set down his foot, and yet went and disappeared on the 
roads ; and who, taking the same and yet different roads, 
goes round and round amidst the worlds.” Horses, too, 
as we moderns know by thejclassic chariot of the sun, 
figure in mythic astronomy. Prof. De Gubernatis gives 
us the beautiful little Russian nature-tale of the maiden 
_ Basilica, who, on her way to the old witch’s house, sees a 
black horseman all in black on a black horse, and then 
night falls ; then she sees a white horseman on a white 
horse, and day dawns; then a red horseman on a red 
horse, and the sun rises. The story has been told already 
in England, but deserves telling again for its absolute 
certainty of meaning, which hardly requires the old witch’s 
explanation that the black, white, and red horsemen are 
mythic personifications of night, day, and sun. If, then, 
we meet with stories very like unquestionable nature-myths, 
there is a strong case for the mythologists who say these 
stories are also nature-myths, whose original meaning 
has been forgotten, so that they have fallen into the 
state of mere fanciful tales. Thus, in an Esthonian 
story quoted by our author, this same notion appears 
of the three horsemen who are personifications of the 
great periods of light and darkness. The hero comes to 
deliver the princess from the glass mountain where she 
sleeps, and he comes dressed first in bronze colour on a 
bronze-coloured horse, next in silver on a silyer-coloured 
horse, and lastly in golden garb on a golden horse. This 
certainly looks like a story suggested by the victorious 
noonday sun coming at last with glowing rays to accom- 
plish the task he had failed to perform in darkness or 
twilight, to deliver the Spring from the icy fortress of 
Winter, or, as our nursery tale has it, to awaken the 
Sleeping Beauty in the Palace where the spell of Winter 
has bound her and hers in numbness andsilence, Valeat 
quantum. 
The scientific study of mythology will be advanced by 
the collection of mythic episodes made with extraordinary 
earning by Prof. De Gubernatis. It is a museum of 
material, and a good many of the author's rationalisations 
of old legends seem plausible. For instance, he adds 
new versions to the group of tales (towhich belong “ Tom 
Thumb” and “ Little Red Ridinghood”) in which the 
night is dramatised as a wolf or other monster, which 
swallows and afterwards releases the hero who represents 
the sun or day. He goes on to interpret in the same way 
the stories where the hero is shut up in the sack or chest 
and cast into the water, but comes safe to land after all, 
as the sun, shrouded in the shades of evening, crosses 
the ocean and reappears at morning. The value of such 
interpretations as these depends, of course, on careful 
comparison of evidence. Unhappily, however, the gene- 
ral method of the book is unscientific. The author has 
no strict logic in him. His argument is substantially 
this : natural phenomena often suggest to tale-tellers or 
poets ideas which they shape into cock-and-bull stories ; 
therefore, the way to interpret cock-and-bull stories in gene- 
ral is to guess at some natural phenomena which may have 
suggested them. The consequence of such a principle of 
interpretation is a network of tangled guesses, which often 
only mystify the legends they pretend to explain. The 
ease with which such a method can be applied, and the 
worthlessness of its results when it is applied, are shown 
in the authors treatment of common proverbs, As a 
tule, proverbs really require no explanation ; their origin 
is intelligible at a glance, as it always was; we feel we 
might have made them ourselves, if we had been clever 
enough, and proverb-making had been still in fashion, 
Not so our author. “The black cow gives white milk” 
means to him that the night produces the dawn, or the 
moon, or the Milky Way (we are allowed to take our 
choice which we like best). ‘Though the cow’s tail 
waggles, it does not fall,” seemsto us to require no recon- 
dite explanation ; but to Prof. De Gubernatis it connects 
itself with a whole fabric of speculations about the night- 
monster running after the dawn-cow’s tail to clutch it. 
On the whole, we can hardly better characterise the work 
before us, in its combination of curious material and 
; absurd argument, than by quoting the following piece of 
amazing nonsense, ending ina parenthesis with a little 
fact which will be new to most of our readers, and which 
shows that modern Italy has so kept up old classic cus- 
toms, that the proverb “Ab ovo usque ad mala” still 
explains itself, just as we might now say, “From soup to 
dessert ” :— ; 
“The hen of the fable and the fairy tales, which lays 
golden eggs, is the mythical hen (the earth or the sky) 
which gives birth every day tothe sun. The golden egg 
is the beginning of life in Orphic and Hindoo cosmogony ; 
by the golden egg the world begins to move, and move- 
ment is the principle of good. The golden egg brings 
forth the luminous, laborious, and beneficent day. Hence 
it is an excellent augury to begin with the egg, which 
represents the principle of good, whence the equivocal 
Latin proverb, ‘Ad ovo ad malum,’ which signified 
‘From good to evil,’ but which properly meant ‘From 
