308 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 



From the incredulous geographer wlio records tlie stories of 

 tlie fossil lentils and the hissing sun, yet another Myth of Ob- 

 servation may be taken, which shows well the easy transition 

 from " it may have been/' to " it was/' which lies at their root. 

 Mr. Catlin, iu one of his journeys, says that he came to a place 

 where he saw rocks " looking as if they had actually dropped 

 from the clouds in such a confused mass, and all lay where 

 they had fallen." So in old times, a round plain between Mar- 

 seilles and the mouths of the Ehone was called the " stony " 

 plain, from its being Covered with stones as big as a man's fist. 

 You would think, says Pomponius Mela, that the stones had 

 rained there, so many are they, and so far and wide do they 

 lie.^ Now ^schylus, says Strabo, having perceived the diffi- 

 culty of accounting for these stones, or having heard about it 

 from some one else, has wrested the whole matter into a myth. 

 In some lines of his, preserved to us by Strabo' s quotation of 

 them, Prometheus, explaining to Hercules his way from the 

 Caucasus to the Hesperides, tells him how when his missiles 

 fail him in his fight with the Ligurians, and the soft earth will 

 not even afi'ord him a stone, Jove, pitying his defenceless state, 

 will rain down a shower of round pebbles over the ground, 

 hurling which he will easily rout his foes.^ 



Fossil remains have for ages been objects of curious specu- 

 lation to mankind. In the most distant regions where huge 

 bones have been found, they have been explained, truly enough, 

 as being the bones of monstrous beasts, and as plausibly, 

 though, as later investigations have shown within the last cen- 

 tury, not so correctly, as bones of giants. Given the belief that 

 the earth was formerly inhabited by monsters and giants, the 

 myth-making power of the human mind gave " a local habita- 

 tion and a name " wherever it was required, and the battles of 

 these monsters with each other, and with man, were worked 

 into the general mass of popular tradition, Avith gradually in- 

 creasing fulness and accuracy of detail. The Asiatic sagas 

 which have grown out of the finding of the frozen mammoths, 

 and the fossil remains of these and other great extinct ani- 

 naals, are excellent cases in point. Many of them have been 

 1 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 70. Mela, ii. c. 5. ^ gtrabo, iv. 1, 7. 



