Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/310

292 prince and leader of reactionary philosophers, maintains against modern astronomers the ancient doctrine of personal will in astronomic motion, and even the theory of animated planets.

Poetry has so far kept alive in our minds the old animative theory of nature, that it is no great effort to us to fancy the waterspout a huge giant or sea-monster, and to depict in what we call appropriate metaphor its march across the fields of ocean. But where such forms of speech are current among less educated races, they are underlaid by a distinct prosaic meaning of fact. Thus the waterspouts which the Japanese see so often off their coasts are to them long-tailed dragons, 'flying up into the air with a swift and violent motion,' wherefore they call them 'tatsmaki,' 'spouting dragons.' Waterspouts are believed by some Chinese to be occasioned by the ascent and descent of the dragon; although the monster is never seen head and tail at once for clouds, fishermen and sea-side folk catch occasional glimpses of him ascending from the water and descending to it. In the mediæval Chronicle of John of Bromton there is mentioned a wonder which happens about once a month in the Gulf of Satalia, on the Pamphylian coast. A great black dragon seems to come in the clouds, letting down his head into the waves, while his tail seems fixed to the sky, and this dragon draws up the waves to him with such avidity that even a laden ship would be taken up on high, so that to avoid this danger the crews ought to shout and beat boards to drive the dragon off. However, concludes the chronicler, some indeed say that this is not a dragon, but the sun drawing up the water, which seems more true. The Moslems still account for waterspouts as caused by gigantic demons, such as that one described in the 'Arabian Nights:' — 'The sea