Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/694

676 allow themselves to be influenced, unconsciously perhaps, by the Neapolitan superstition. "It can do no harm, and may do some good," they might be tempted to reply to you, as some gamblers do when you jest with them concerning their fetiches. This kind of reasoning is quite general among polytheistic populations, where every one thinks it good to do homage to other peoples' gods, and to unknown gods as well as his own; for who knows which one he may not need in this world or the next? Egyptian scarabs are found by the thousand, from Mesopotamia to Sardinia, wherever the armies of the Pharaohs or Phoenician ships have gone. Everywhere, also, in these regions, native scarabs have been collected, made in imitation of those of Egypt, and reproducing with greater or less exactness the symbols which the engravers of the valley of the Nile lavished upon the faces of their amulets. So also, long before the diffusion of coins, pottery, and jewels, the figurines of Greece and Etruria furnished all central and western Europe with divine types and symbolical images.

Are there any indications that permit us to distinguish whether like symbols have been engendered separately or are derived from the same source? The complexity and oddness of the forms, when they exceed certain limits, go to sustain the second of these hypotheses. The double-headed eagle of the old German Empire has now passed into the arms of Austria and Russia. The Englishmen Barthe and Hamilton were surprised when, traveling in Asia Minor some fifty years ago, they discovered a two-headed eagle of the same pattern engraved among religious scenes in the basreliefs of Pteria, which went back to the ancient Hittites. It is hard to suppose that a representation identical in features, so contrary to the laws of nature, was spontaneously imagined in both instances. M. Longperier furnished a solution to the riddle when he pointed out that the two-headed eagle did not replace the oneheaded eagle on the arms of the empire till after the expedition of Frederick II to the East; that it figured at the beginning of the thirteenth century on the coins and banners of the Turkoman princes, then masters of Asia Minor. The latter adopted it as the symbol of all power, perhaps to figure the hamca, the fabulous bird of the Mussulman traditions, which carries off buffaloes and elephants as the kite carries off mice. Thus the Turkish race, M. Perrot observes, saw the entrance to the West closed at Lepanto and Belgrade by the eagle which had led it triumphantly on the banks of the Euphrates, and the image of which it also had borrowed from the sculptures cut by its predecessors on the rocks of Eniuk and Jasilikaïa.

If sufficient indications can not be drawn from the form, identity of signification and use may give strong presumptions respecting the affiliation of symbols. It is not surprising that the Hindoos