Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/759

 P H A P H A 727 better preserved MS. of Perotti in the Vatican, which was published by Angelo Mai in 1831. For some time the authenticity of these new fables was disputed, but they are now generally accepted, and with justice, as genuine fables of Phsedrus. They do not form a sixth book, for we know from Avianus that Phoedrus wrote five books only, but it is impossible to assign them to their original places in the five books. They are usually printed as an appendix. Even thus it is probable that we have not the whole of Phaedrus. In the Middle Ages Phsedrus exercised a considerable influence through the prose versions of his fables which were current, though his own works and even his name were forgotten. Of these prose versions the oldest existing seems to be that known as the &quot; Anony- mus Nilantianus,&quot; so called because first edited by Nilant at Ley den in 1709 from a MS. of the 10th or beginning of the llth century. It approaches the text of Phsedrus so closely that it was probably made directly from it. Of the sixty-seven fables which it contains thirty are derived from lost fables of Phsedrus. But the largest and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus is that which bears the name of &quot;Romulus.&quot; It contains eighty-three fables, is as old as the 10th century, and seems to have been based on a still ear lier prose version, which, under the name of &quot;^Esop,&quot; and addressed to one Rufus, may have been made in the Carlovingian period. The preface of Romulus, in which he professes to have translated the fables from the Greek, is a mere fiction of the copyist ; no such Romulus as this ever existed, although in the Middle Ages he was sometimes thought to have been a Roman emperor, and has still a place in the Biographic Univcrselle (1863). The collection of fables in the Weissenburg (now Wolfeubiittel) MS. is based on the same version (the sEsopus ad Rufum) as Romulus. These three prose versions contain in all one hundred distinct fables, of which fifty- six are derived from the existing and the remaining forty-four presumably from lost fables of Phfedrus. Some modern scholars, as Burmann, Dressier, and L. Miiller, have tried to restore these lost fables by versifying the prose versions. The collection bearing the name of Romulus became in its turn the source from which, during the second half of the Middle Ages, almost all the collections of Latin fables in prose and verse were wholly or partially drawn. A version of the first three books of Romulus in elegiac verse enjoyed a wide popularity, even into the Renaissance. Its author (generally referred to since the edition of Nevelet in 1610 as the Anonymous of Nevelet) was long unknown, but Hervieux has lately shown grounds for identifying him with Waltlier of England, chaplain to Henry II. and afterwards arch bishop of Palermo. The version dates from the latter part of the 12th century. It was especially popular in Italy, where the Italian translation of Accio Zuccho (Verona, 1479) was frequently reprinted. Another version of Romulus in Latin elegiacs was made by Alexander Neckam, born at St Albans in 1157, and towards the end of his life (early part of 13th century) abbot of the Augustinian monastery at Exeter. Neckam knew and copied Walther s version, but his own never had the same popularity. Amongst the collections partly derived from Romulus the most famous is probably that in French verse by MARIE DE FRANCE (q.v.). About 1200 a collection of fables in Latin prose, based partly on Romulus, was made by the Cistercian monk Odo of Sherrington ; they have a strong mediaeval and clerical tinge. In 1370 Gerard of Minden wrote a poetical version of Romulus in Low German. Since the first edition of Phsedrus by Pithou in 1506 the editions and transla tions have been very numerous ; among the editions may specially be mentioned those of Burmann (1718 and 1727), Bentley (1726), Sclnvabe (1806), Berger de Xivrey (1830), Orelli (1832), Eyssenhardt (1S67), L. Miiller (1877), Hervieux, in his work Les Fabulistes Latins depuis le siede ff Augusts jusqu a la fin du moyen age, Paris, 1884. For the mediaeval versions of Phfedrus and their de rivatives see L. Roth, in Philologus, i. p. 523 sq. ; H. Oesterley, Romulus die Paraphratcn des Phxdrus und die aesopische Fabel im M Utelalter, 1870 (untrust worthy); E. Grosse, in Jahrbb. f. class. Philol., vol. cv. (1872); and especially the learned work of Hervieux, who gives the Latin texts of all the mediaeval imitators (direct and indirect) of Phsedrus, some of these texts being now edited for the first time. (J. G. FR.) PHAETHON (&quot;the shining one&quot;), in Homer an epithet of the sun, and used by later writers as a name for the sun, is more generally known in classical mythology as a son of the Sun and the ocean nymph Clymene. He persuaded his father to let him drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, but he lost control of the horses, and driving too near the earth scorched it ; mountains were set on fire, rivers and seas dried up, Libya became a desert, and the ^Ethiopians were blackened by the heat. To save the earth from utter destruction Zeus killed Phaethon with a thunderbolt. He fell to earth at the mouth of the Eri- danus, a river of northern Europe (identified in later times with the Po), on the banks of which his weeping sisters were transformed into poplars and their tears into amber. This part of the legend points to the mouth of the Oder or Vistula, where amber abounds. Phaethon was the sub ject of a drama of Euripides, of which some fragments remain. The suggestion that the legend of Phaethon is a mythical expression of vast increases of temperature pro duced at long intervals by changes in the relative position of the earth and the heavenly bodies was made by Plato (Timseus, 22 C, D). PHALANGER. Among the anonymous additions to Charles 1 Ecluse s posthumous work Curse, posteriores ; sen plurimarum non ante cognitarum aut descriptarum. . . animalium novae, descriptiones, published at Leyden in 1611, occurs the following : &quot; In our third expedition, under Admiral Van der Hagen, there was seen at Amboyna a rare and truly marvellous animal. The cousa, as it is called by the natives, is a reddish animal, a little larger than a cat, which has under its belly a kind of pouch in which the mammse are placed, and in this the young are born, and remain there hanging firmly on until large enough to be turned out by their mother. They return, however, continually to the pouch until sufficiently developed to follow their mother and to find food for themselves. These animals live on grass, green leaves, and other vegetable food, and their flesh is eaten by the Portuguese and other native Christians, but not by the Mohammedans, who con sider the cousa to be an unclean and forbidden animal, mainly on account of its want of horns.&quot; This early account forms the first mention of any of the numerous marsupials of the eastern hemisphere, as there can be no doubt that the animal called the cousa by the natives of Amboyna nearly 300 years ago was the Grey Cuscus (Cuscus orientalis), a member of the only marsupial genus occurring in any Eastern land then known to Euro peans. About a hundred years afterwards the same animal was seen by the Dutch traveller Valentyn, also at Amboyna, and still later Buffon gave to a pair of cuscuses examined by him the name that heads this article, &quot; Phalanger,&quot; on account of the peculiar structure of the second and third toes of the hind feet, which are united in a common skin up to the nails, a character now known to be present in a large proportion of the Australian marsupials. Later, Captain Cook in 1770 and 1777, Governor Phillip in 1788, and J. White in 1790 discovered various different kinds of phalangers, and now we know of not less than ten genera, with about thirty -five species, forming the sub -family Phalangistinse of the family Phalangistidse, whose general characters have already been noticed in the article MAM MALIA (vol. xv. p. 382). Phalangers as a whole are small woolly-coated animals, with long, powerful, and often prehensile tails, large claws, and, as in the American opossums, with opposable nailless great toes. Their expression seems in the day to be dull and sleepy, but by night they appear to decidedly greater advantage. They live mostly upon fruit, leaves, and blossoms, although some few feed habitually upon insects, and all relish, when in confinement, an occasional bird or other small animal. Several of the phalangers possess flying membranes stretched between their fore and hind limbs, by the help of which they can make long and sus tained leaps through the air, like the flying squirrels; but it is interesting to notice that the possession of these flying membranes does not seem to be any indication of special affinity, the characters of the skull and teeth sharply dividing the flying forms, and uniting them with other species of the non-flying groups. Their skulls (see fig. 1) are as a rule broad and flattened, with the posterior part swollen out laterally, owing to the numerous air-cells situated in the substance of the squamosals. The dental formula is very variable, especially as regards the pre- molars, of which some at least in each genus are reduced to mere functionless rudiments, and may even vary in number on the two sides of the jaw of the same individual. The