BIRD AND BEAST IN ANCIENT SYMBOLISM. 183 



herring on their groats. Mr Bidgeway's theory is of a piece with the speculations of 

 those who, running folk-lore to the death, seek to read antiquity in the light of savagery ; 

 who see the childhood of the world in a culminating age of astronomic science, symbolic 

 art, and mystical religion, and who arrive at what I unhesitatingly regard as miscon- 

 ception by the double blunder of unduly depreciating the complexity of initial or archaic 

 Greek thought, and unduly exalting the importance and too freely correlating the 

 results of their own study of incipient or semibarbarous civilisations. We must see 

 fallacy in any theory which treats as nascent and primitive the civilisation of a period 

 of exalted poetry, the offspring of ages of antecedent culture ; which sees but a small 

 advance on recent barbarism in ways of life simple in some respects but rich in 

 developed art and stored with refined tradition ; that looks only for the ways and habits 

 and thoughts of primitive man in races supported by a background of philosophical 

 and scientific culture of an unfathomed, and maybe unfathomable, antiquity. Behind 

 early Hellenic civilisation was all the wisdom of Egypt and the East, and the first 

 Greeks of whom we have knowledge looked upon the old Heaven and the old Earth not 

 with the half-open, wondering eyes of wakening intelligence, but with perceptions trained 

 in an ancient inheritance of accumulated learning. 



On gold coins of Croesus we find our two symbols of the Lion and the Bull, some- 

 times facing one another, sometimes joined by their necks. Whatever may be precisely 

 signified in the latter case, it seems to me plain enough that the collocation of 

 the two animals here, together with the presence of the Lion alone, 

 or of the Lion with other animals, on coins of the same place and 

 period, should make us hesitate to see in this Ox-type the emblem 

 and memento of a primitive trade : apart even from the inherent 

 improbability involved in supposing that the Ox was the great 

 staple of commerce and fixed standard of value over mainland and 

 islands, through regions inland and maritime, among people peaceful Fig. 3.— Coinof 

 or warlike, stationary or nomadic, pastoral or mercantile ; while any 

 argument that, in this particular case, we had the old trade-symbol of the Ox coupled 

 with the Lion as a personal or dynastic crest is negatived by the frequency and wide 

 distribution of the same two figures in conjunction. 



If the Lion and the Bull in combat represent zodiacal signs, we should expect them to 

 do so in like manner when figured separately or when associated with other symbols. 

 Numismatists have long recognised the Lion on coins of Leontini, Syracuse, Apollonia 

 on the Euxine, &c, as a solar symbol* : it is evidently in relation to the sign Leo that 

 it is so ; and I need scarcely remind the reader that the same sign is, in fable, the Lion 

 of Nemea, with whose defeat the solar Hercules began the cycle of his labours.t 



* Of. Head, Hist. Numorum, pp. 131, 152, 236, &c. 



t Cf. Dupuis, Origine de tons Us cultes, i. p. 191, &c. From this learned and original work, oftener quoted, as 

 Crkdzer says (Symb., iv. p. 696), than acknowledged, I have got great help, not in the inception but in the elaboration 

 of my theory. 



