Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/166

156, Persians, Greeks, Latins, and Germans, the story of the creation corresponds with the picture afforded by the apparent new birth of the world after each storm.

There are those who have seen in myths simple metaphors conceived by poets and taken seriously by their hearers. Thus, when Pindar represents Excuse as the daughter of Reflection, when Prodicus speaks of Hercules as the butt of two women who personify Pleasure and Virtue, they give those images the sense that we ourselves would attach to them; but the figures are taken in earnest by the masses, and so myth arises from metaphor and parable. With still more probability has some confusion of this kind resulted from changes of language, when the appellations of objects personified in this way have lost their primitive signification, and no longer suggest anything but proper names.

Some postulate besides this auricular mythology an ocular one, holding that the origin of myths should be sought in uncomprehended or badly interpreted drawings. Coins, cups, and primitive objects of art in which emblems, personages, and real or fancied scenes are represented, have set the imagination at work of strangers who acquired them, and they have tried to explain the figures by extemporized legends. According to M. Clermont-Ganneau, the Chimæra and its legend originated in a composition quite common on the Lycian monuments, in which a lion appeared to be devouring a deer. The two animals, if we should suppose them combined by an inexact or ignorant copyist, might in fact give the idea of a monster formed by an amalgamation of the lion and the deer or goat. So the triple Geryon, slain by Hercules, is found among the Egyptian monuments under the form of three men kneeling before a victorious hero.

According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, the adventures attributed to the celestial bodies and personified phenomena, to the sun, moon, sky, twilight, etc., originally related to human beings bearing the names of those bodies or phenomena as their heroes. Thus, a person who left a living memory among following generations was called Aurora, because he was born at dawn, or for some other reason. Gradually he became confounded with the dawn, and his adventures were interpreted in the way that the phenomena of the nascent day made most plausible. Then, as the same name may have belonged to several persons of different tribes and times, such a juxtaposition of contradictory stories as we find in most mythologies would inevitably have been brought about.

My conclusion is that there is truth in each of these theories, and that they do not all exhaust the matter. The law of intellectual development is one, but its combinations are infinite, and to seek to