Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/832

Rh 808 P R P R O men of clay, fire-stealing is no more than a single example. This tendency to evolve the whole myth of Prometheus from a belief that he is personified fire, or the fire-god, has been intensified by Kuhn s ingenious and plausible etymo logy of the name Ilpo^flevs. The Greeks derived it from TrpofjirjOij-;, &quot; provident,&quot; and connected it with such other words as Trpo/x^^e o/xai, Trpofj.rj6fia. They had also the proper name Eirip-qOevs for the slow-witted brother of Prometheus who turned all the hero s wisdom to foolish ness. Against these very natural etymologies the philo logists support a theory that Prometheus is really a Greek form of pramantha (Ski), the fire-stick of the Hindus. The process of etymological change, as given by Steinthal, was this. The boring of the perpendicular in the horizontal fire-stick, whereby fire was kindled, was called manthana, from math, &quot; I shake.&quot; The preposition pro, was prefixed, and you get pramantha. But Matarig- van was feigned to have brought Agni, fire, and &quot; the fetching of the god was designated by the same verb mathndmi as the proper earthly boring &quot; of the firestick. &quot; Now this verb, especially when compounded with the preposition pra, gained the signification to tear off, snatch to oneself, rob.&quot; 1 Steinthal goes on &quot;Thus the fetching of Agni became a robbery of the fire, and the pramdtha (fire-stick) a robber. The gods had intended, for some reason or other, to withhold fire from men ; a benefactor of mankind stole it from the gods. This robbery was called pramdtha ; pramdthyu-s is he who loves boring or robbery, a borer or robber. From the latter words, according to the peculiarities of Greek phonology, is formed Ilpo/^eu-s, Prometheus. He is therefore a fire- god,&quot; &c. Few things more ingenious than this have ever been done by philologists. It will be observed that &quot; forgetfulness of the meaning of words &quot; is made to account for the Greek belief that fire was stolen from the gods. To recapitulate the doctrine more succinctly, men originally said, in Sanskrit (or some Aryan speech more ancient still), &quot; fire is got by rubbing or boring ;&quot; nothing could have been more scientific and straightforward. They also said, &quot; fire is brought by Matarigvan ;&quot; nothing can be more in accordance with the mythopoeic mode of thought. Then the word which means &quot; fetched &quot; is con fused with the word which means &quot;bored,&quot; and gains the sense of &quot;robbed.&quot; Lastly, fire is said (owing to this confusion) to have been stolen, and the term which meant the common savage fire-stick is by a process of delusion conceived to represent, not a stick, but a person, Prometheus, who stole fire. Thus then, according to the philologists, arose the myth that fire was stolen, a myth which, we presume, would not otherwise have occurred to Greeks. Now we have not to decide whether the Greeks were right in thinking that Prometheus only meant &quot; the fore-sighted wise man,&quot; or whether the Germans know better, and are correct when they say the name merely meant &quot; fire-stick.&quot; But we may, at least, point out that the myth of the stealing of fire and of the fire-stealer is current among races who are not Aryan, and never heard the word pramantha. We have shown that Thlinkeets, Ahts, Andaman Islanders, Australians, Maoris, South Sea Islanders, Cahrocs, and others all believe fire was origin ally stolen. Is it credible that, in all their languages, the name of the fire-stick should have caused a confusion of thought which ultimately led to the belief that fire was obtained originally by larceny? If such a coincidence appears incredible, we may doubt whether the belief that is common to Greeks and Cahrocs and Ahts was pro duced, in Greek minds by an etymological confusion, in Australia, America, and so forth by some other cause. What, then, is the origin of the widely-diffused myth that Cf. Kuhn, op. cil., pp. 16, 17. fire was stolen? We offer a purely conjectural suggestion. No race is found without fire, but certain races 2 are said to have no means of artificially reproducing fire ; whether this be true or not, certainly even some civilized races have found the artificial reproduction of fire very tedious. Thus we read (Oil., v. 488-493), &quot;As when a man hath hidden away a brand in the black embers at an upland farm, one that hath no neighbour nigh, and so saveth the seed of fire that he may not have to seek a light other where, even so did Odysseus cover him with the leaves.&quot; If, in the Homeric age, men found it so hard to get the seed of fire, what must the difficulty have been in the earliest dawn of the art of fire-making? Suppose, then, that the human groups of early savages are hostile. One group lets its fire go out, the next thing to do would be to borrow a light from the neighbour, perhaps several miles off. But, if the neighbours are hostile, the unlucky group is cut off from fire, igni interdicitur. The only way to get fire in such a case is to steal it. Men accustomed to such a precarious condition might readily believe that the first possessors of fire, wherever they were, set a high value on it, and refused to communicate it to others. Hence the belief that fire was originally stolen. This hypothesis at least explains all myths of fire-stealing by the natural needs, passions, and characters of men, &quot;a jealous race,&quot; whereas the philological theory explains the Greek myth by an exceptional accident of changing language, and leaves the other widely diffused myths of fire-stealing in the dark. It would occupy too much space to discuss, in the ethnological method, the rest of the legend of Prometheus. Like the Australian Pundjel, and the Maori Tiki, he made men of clay. He it was who, when Zeus had changed his wife into a fly, and swallowed her, broke open the god s head and let out his daughter Athene. He aided Zeus in the struggle with the Titans. He was punished by him on some desolate hill (usually styled Cau casus) for fire-stealing, and was finally released by Heracles. His career may be studied in Hesiod, in the splendid Prometheus Vinctus of /Eschylus, with the scholia, in Heyne s A2)ollodorus, in the excursus (1) of Schiizius to the yEschylean drama, and in the frequently quoted work of Kuhn. The essay of Steinthal may also be examined (Goldziher, Myth. Hebr., Engl. transl., p. 363-392), where the amused student will discover that &quot; Moses is a Pra- manthas,&quot; with much else that is learned and convincing. See also Mr Tyler s Early History of Man ; Mr Nesfield in Calcutta Ee.view, January, April, 1884; and above, art. FIIIK, vol. ix. p. 227s?. (A. L.) PRONGBUCK. See ANTELOPE, vol. ii. p. 102, and Plate I. fig. G. PEONY, GASPARD CLAIR FRANCOIS MARIE RICHE DE (1755-1839), a celebrated French engineer, was born at Chamelet, in the department of the Rhone, 22d July 1755, and was educated at the Ecole des Fonts et Chaus- se&quot;es. His Memoire sur la poussee des voutes published in 1783, in defence of the principles of bridge construction introduced by his master Peronnet, attracted special atten tion. Under Peronnet he was engaged in restoring the fort of Dunkirk in 1785, and in erecting the bridge of Louis XVI. in 1787. The laborious enterprise of drawing up the famous Tables du Cadastre was entrusted to his direction in 1792, and in 1798 he was appointed director at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussdes. He was employed by Napoleon to superintend the engineering operations both for protecting the province of Ferrara against the inundations of the Po and for draining and improving the Pontine Marshes. After the Restoration he was likewise engaged in regulating the course of the Rhone, and in several other important works. He was made a baron in 1828, and a peer in 1835. He was also a member of the principal academies and scientific societies of Europe. He died at Lyons 31st July 1839. 2 Tylor, Early History of Man.