520 Discovery of Horse-heads. By Dr. E. C. Robertson. 



The neck is long extended like that of a stork, and the jaws or 

 rather bill wide open, as if grasping something. It may be con- 

 jectured, that when first carved on the hill side, the jaws were 

 extended to complete the stork-like bill, holding a ball. The 

 resemblance betwixt the representation on the coin and that on 

 the hill side is so marked, that we may fairly consider that the 

 designers of both had the same mystic idea in common, and that 

 the bird-like horse was the offspring of the reverence of the Early 

 Britons for the great luminary. In the rude relief on the coin 

 and the ruder sculpture on the hiU side, we have much what the 

 Greeks did, when on an amphora they pictured the Sirens of the 

 Odyssey by birds with womens' faces. 



In the Triads, the ancient Welsh poems, we have several mar- 

 vellous horses mentioned, such as the wonderful mare of Tevinyen, 

 which foaled on the night of every first of May, the great feast 

 of the Sun among the Celts, and no one ever knew what became 

 of the colt. There also we read, " The white horse took it at a 

 gallop through thirty cities and three hundred towns, which had 

 ceased to be Boman." 



Many other superstitions are common to India and Britain. 

 For instance the virtues of the mountain ash, the rowan tree, are 

 weU known. The Hindu master of a herd, in spring, cuts a rod 

 of it and strikes his cows that they may yield milk. In "West- 

 phalia, and also in Sweden, on the 1st of May, he does the same 

 thing, with the same prayer. In "Wales, on a certain day in the 

 year, every person wore a cross of the wood to avert evil spirits.* 

 In Cornwall a sprig of rowan is carried as a charm against an 

 evil wish, or as a remedy against disease, whilst in Scotland the 

 dairy-maid will not forget to drive the cattle to the summer pas- 

 ture with a rod of rowan tree, which she carefully lays by until 

 the time comes to drive them home again with the same. Espec- 

 ially in Britain do Indian superstitions seem numerous, and 

 more usually met with than on the Continent. The Celts were 

 the earliest wave that left the Aryan home, on their journey to- 

 wards the setting sun. The first of these hordes of colonists, 

 stated by historians to have been Buddhists from the north of 

 India mingled with Brahmins, driven on by following migrants, 

 ultimately settle! in Britain. They probably had aU the early 



* Here the wood with a Pagan superstition makes a Christian cross, a 

 remarkable instance of an object of heathen superstition being used to 

 form a Christian emblem. 



