219 
1890.] punch-marked coins op Hindustan, ^c. 
ing enthusiasm or fear in the breasts of our ingenuoi^s forefathers, n'lio 
lived in the open air with their herds of cattle, and stood with earth 
and sky in constant relation, and in continual communion. Wo busy 
dwellers in great cities, held back by a thousand social ties, oppressed by 
a thousand public or private cares, never happen to raise our eyes to- 
wards the sky, except it be to consult it on the probability of fine or 
wet weather; but evidently this is not sufficient to enable us to com- 
prehend the vast and complicated epic poem transacted in the heavens.” 
{Zoological Mythology, Preface p. xxiv). To give an actual instance 
of this child-like simplicity in men far removed from the primitive times 
pictured by Gubernatis, we have only to turn to the memoirs of Ben- 
venuto Cellini and peruse his account of a Salamander he saw when 
quite a boy. A father of the present day who fancied he saw a Sala- 
mander, basking in the fire under the kettle, would probably seize a 
pair of tongs with the view of securing .such a curiosity for the local 
Museum, but this is what Cellini’s father did in similar circumstances : 
“ When I was about five years of age, my father happened to be in a 
little room in which they had been washing and where there was a good 
oak fire burning : with a fiddle in his hand he sang and played near the 
fire, the weather being exceedingly cold. Looking into the fire, he saw 
a little animal resembling a lizard, which lived and enjoyed itself in the 
hottest flames. Instantly perceiving what it was, he called for my 
sister and after he had shown us the creature he gave me a box on the 
ear : I fell a-crying, while he, soothing me with his caresses said,” My 
dear child, I do not give you that blow for any fault you have committed, 
but that you may remember that the little lizard which you see in the 
fire is a Salamander : a creature which no one that I have heard of ever 
beheld before.” So saying, he embraced mo, and gave mo some money.” 
But as it takes a strenuous effort for the unaccustomed swimmer to dive 
to any depth, so it costs us a severe, and generally fruitless effort, to 
penetrate mentally the oceanic depths of medimval credulity, when 
sacred books and sacred myths were composed by earnest men, of the 
type of Cellini’s father who would have probably gone to the stake 
rather than admit that there was no real Salamander seen by him what- 
ever but only the creation of his own fancy ! 
39. Humped Bull couchant before a ‘ Taurine.’ Fig. 16. 
This is an interesting example of the interchangeable character of 
the symbols of Mithraism and Nature worship or Sivaism. In India 
the humped bull is the ‘ vahan ’ of Siva alone, but in the Mithraic 
religion of Persia, the bull represents the sun, so that the present sym- 
bol is capablo of appealing either to the worshipper of Mithra or Mahadev 
