THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIs?. 3 
myriads of insects around them, the birds and their migra- 
tions, the animal life in the woods, all these things must have 
interested them greatly. Is there any record of their impres- 
sions? In legend ‘and folk lore, and later still in poetic trag- 
ments of writings of men of whose names even we have some- 
times no record. ‘There were conventional explanations of 
many of nature’s phenomena, as in the case of the seasons. 
The story of Demeter and Persephone, for instance, popular- 
ized by the painting of Sir Frederick Leighton, tells how 
Persephone was spirited away to his underground world by 
Pluto, how Demeter, mourning for her daughter, caused the 
seed to lie unfertilised in the furrow, and famine and desola- 
tion to come over the land. How at last Zeus sent Hermes to 
bring Persephone back from the lower world and restore her 
to her mother. At the meeting of mother and daughter the 
plants burst into flower and all nature revived. A com- 
promise was effected, and for two-thirds of the year Persephone 
remained with her mother, for the remaining four months she 
returned to the lower world. And so they accounted for the 
seasons and the accidents of famine and drought by the vagar- 
ies of the gods. There was a belief, current later also amongst 
the Greeks, that trees and flowers were the dwelling places of 
living spirits; they accounted for many things by the supposed 
transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint and 
hyacinth. Walter Pater points out that in one Homeric hymn 
it states that at the moment of birth of the nymphs, which 
animate the forest tree, oak tree or pine grew up, and when 
each nymph died the bark of the tree fell off and the branches 
perished. ; 
They accounted for the foliage of the trees, the petals of 
the flowers, and the skins of the fruit by the spinning and 
weaving of the fairy fingers of the forest nymphs. Dionysius 
was the soul of the vine, the spirit alive, and leaping in a thou- 
sand vines, so the generation of the sweetness and strength in 
the veins of the vines and the transformation of all into the 
grape were due to him, “‘what is to us a secret chemistry of 
nature being to them the mediation of living spirits.” 
There are some delightful references to insects in Greek 
poetry, from these I have taken a few which are of especial 
interest to us. Here is one attributed to Meleager :— 
“<Q thou grasshopper that cheatest me of my 
regrets, the soother of slumber;—O thou grass- 
hopper that art the muse of ploughed fields, and art 
with shrill wings the self-formed imitation of the 
lyre, chirrup me something pleasant, while beating 
thy vocal wings with thy feet. How I wish, O grass- 
hopper that thou wouldst release me from the 
troubles of much sleepless care, weaving the thread 
