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THE PHARAOH OF THE EXODUS IDENTIFIED 

 IN THE MYTH OF ADONIS. 



BY THE REV. J. CAMPBELL, M.A. 



Read before the Canadian Institute, March 11th, 1871. 



The title of this paper plainly proclaims its writer a student of that old 

 and much abused school of mythology, which Euhemerus is supposed 

 to have founded more than two thousand years ago. I am convinced, 

 with this ancient, that the gods and heroes, about whose descents and 

 deeds mythology is concerned, were neither the creatures of fancy nor 

 personifications of moral qualities and natural phenomena, but real 

 men and women, who once played their parts upon the world's stage, 

 and who, for the good or evil in them, were deified by their subject 

 contemporaries or by their descendants. I am not disposed altogether 

 to discard the ethical and physical solutions, of which Prof Max Mtiller 

 speaks in the second series of his Lectures on the Science of Language,^ 

 nor his own philological solution of the question, "Whence came 

 myths?" It seems abundantly evident that many old classical tales 

 were put into the shape in which they have come down to us by men 

 who desired to point a moral ; that some were made vehicles to convey 

 astronomical and other physical truths ; and that corruptions or changes 

 of language facilitated the growth of not a few, as Bochart attempted 

 to show in the case of equivoques between the Greek and Phoenician 

 languages.^ But I hold, and believe that, as I prosecute my studies in 

 this department of literature, I shall be compelled still more firmly to 

 hold, that the historical solution, however much it may have been 

 abused by great men, such as Vossius,^ Bochart, Huet,* Baniers and 

 Bryant,^ is the only one that solves the ultima ratio of Mythology, and 

 leaves no residuum of miraculous inventive power on the part of the 

 ancients to be accounted for otherwise. While I rejoice in the testi- 



1 Lectures ou the Science of Language, Second Series, lecture ix. 



2 Bocliai-t, Plialeg. L. i, c. 1. ; Canaan, L. i, c. 2S. ; 1692. 



3 Vossius, <j. J. de origine ac progressu idololatriae, 1641. 

 * Huet, P. Dan. Demonstratio Evangelica, 1680. 



6 Banier, Ant. La mythologie et les fables expliquees par I'Mstoire, 1728. 

 6 Bryant, James, New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 1773. 



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