Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/119

Rh So long as cloudland was peopled with terrible beings and horrible monsters it necessarily followed that man was afraid of the creatures of his own imagination.

If a man believes there is a being up in the clouds who throws thunderbolts about, it is but natural that he should be afraid of that being, just as he would be of some one stronger than himself who was throwing stones in ordinary life.

These ideas would be intensified by familiarity with the productions of poets and painters. The poet deals in heroics, and the essence of his art is to embody and personify the manifestations of nature. The painter lives by inspiring awe and exaggerating mental emotions. If he paints a thunderbolt-throwing man, the hero must be colossal and above the strength of ordinary mortals; while if he paints a storm at sea the waves must be mountainous, the sky must be more ominous than was ever seen in nature, and the men's faces must show terror.

Aristophanes parodies the poetic attitude of mind in the following passage from his play called "The Clouds":

". For this reason, then, they introduced into their verses 'the dreadful impetuosity of the lightning-whirling clouds,' and 'the locks of the hundred-headed Typho,' and 'the hard-blowing tempests,' and then 'aerial moist crooked-clawed birds floating in the air.' "

And again:

". Eternal clouds I let us raise into open sight our dewy clear-bright existence from the deep-sounding sea, our father, up to the crests of the wooded hills, whence we look down over the sacred land, nourishing its fruits, and over the rippling of the divine rivers."

Now this is all poetic and very pretty, but the attitude of mind is bad, for this way of looking at things will never brace man up to conquering or utilizing the manifestations of nature.

Let us therefore turn to modern science and see what attitude of mind is engendered by recent research.

Meteorologists now consider that all cloud-forms are the product of the condensation of vapour-laden air under a very limited number of