Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/675

Rh "big girl." This is a most unique bit of child's reasoning, but doubtless each of us can recall personal experiences, if less curious, no less to the purpose. Science is constantly extirpating errors and uprooting old conceits, but meanwhile new ones or modified forms of older ones arise; thus, it has come about that some of our New World zoölogical and botanical fables are of recent birth, although very many, especially those that constitute connected myths, are undoubtedly not indigenous, but, as the floras have it, "naturalized from Europe" or "Asia." It would be a labyrinthine task to attempt to trace out, even approximately, the birth and development of some of the latter that still hold extended sway, but many of them certainly are of very remote origin.

There seems to be the best of reason for believing that, to seek the origin of the popular delusion concerning the curative properties of certain animal excreta, we must study the mythology of our long-ago Aryan ancestors. It would not be in keeping with the object of the present paper to occupy the space necessary to give more than a mere suggestion of the character of the great pastoral poem that is embodied in the old Aryan myth which is described in such interesting detail by De Gubernatis in his "Zoölogical Mythology." Probably every mythical or legendary account of the phenomena of Nature is more or less a mirrored reflection of the environment of its authors: so (as we might have expected) we find that the character of the mythology developed on that ancient Asiatic table-land, to which philologists and ethnologists now look back as to the source of the many branches of the great Indo-European family, was a natural outgrowth of the simple life led by the primitive herdsmen and farmers among whom it arose. Dwelling amid abundant herds, which furnished at once their occupation and their principal sustenance, in an atmosphere redolent of the breath of cattle, this pastoral race most naturally transferred the names and attributes of these objects of their daily care to the heavenly bodies and to various meteorological occurrences. The sky, for them, was peopled with cows and bulls, and celestial phenomena were personified in language which was already in daily use, in its literal sense. Thus arose a whole system of zoological mythology, in which the animals represented and all pertaining to them bore symbolic meanings. A literal interpretation of certain of these mythical beliefs gave rise to "the superstitious Hindoo custom of purifying one's self by means of the excrement of a cow." Later, the same custom passed into ancient Iran, where the urine of various animals was made use of in religious rites. How much stress the sacred books of the Parsees laid upon this mode of lustration may be gathered from the brief account of the use of the "Nirang," as the liquid in question is called, given in Max Müller's "Chips from a German Workshop."