28 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
ness for the fruits of the ground in offerings of the green 
grass which made beautiful his pathway through the 
world, and by the seeds of which his fields were sown 
with plenty. The period is of immense antiquity when 
the inhabitants of the sacred region of the Nile began 
first, from the vestal hearth, to sacrifice to the celestial 
gods, not myrrh, cassia, nor the first fruits of things 
mingled with the crocus of frankincense—for afterwards, 
when wanting the necessities of life, those were offered 
with great labour and many tears, as libations to the 
god,—“but grass, which as a certain soft wool of a 
prolific nature, they plucked with their hands.” “ They 
gathered the blades and the roots, and all the germs of 
this herb, and committed them to the flames, as a sacri¬ 
fice to the gods, to whom they paid immortal honour 
through fire.”^ Hence, too, the patriarchs and poets 
of the olden times painted Damater, the mother of the 
gods—the same that was Cu-bell, the chief goddess of 
the Chaldeans, the Cybele of the Ionians, and the Bhoia 
of the Doric people—as sitting amid green grass, and 
surrounded with fragrant flowers. On the oldest coins 
of Syria she sits beside the hive, with ears of com in her 
hands, to denote the return of the seasons and their 
exuberance of fruits; while at her feet the grasses grow 
and wave, to typify the seasonal renewals of green beauty 
on the earth. So, too, the benefactors of humanity were 
represented as surrounded with emblems of rural beauty, 
and as such, Saturn, the man of piety and justice, is 
described with the sickle in hand, going over the earth 
to teach its people the tillage of the soil. It was in the 
* Porphyria de Ahstinentia .—Book II., sec. 5. 
