population of naked blacks with frizzled hair had been described six hundred years earlier, and the story, which sounded reasonable to people puzzled by the appearance of a black population in the Andaman islands, is of course repudiated by ethnologists aware of the wide distribution of the negroid Papuans, really so distinct from any race of African negroes.1 Not long since, I met with a very perfect myth of this kind. In a brickfield near London, there had been found a number of fossil elephant bones, and soon afterwards a story was in circulation in the neighbourhood somewhat in this shape: A few years ago, one of Wombwell's caravans was here, an elephant died, and they buried him in the field, and now the scientific gentlemen have found his bones, and think they have got a præ-Adamite elephant.' It seemed almost cruel to spoil this ingenious myth by pointing out that such a prize as a living mammoth was beyond the resources even of Wombwell's menagerie. But so exactly does such a story explain the facts to minds not troubled with nice distinctions between existing and extinct species of elephants, that it was on another occasion invented elsewhere under similar circumstances. This was at Oxford, where Mr. Buckland found the story of the Wombwell's caravan and dead elephant current to explain a similar find of fossil bones. Such explanations of the finding of fossils are easily devised and used to be freely made, as when fossil bones found in the Alps were set down to Hannibal's elephants, or when a petrified oyster-shell found near Mont Cenis set Voltaire reflecting on the crowd of pilgrims on their way to Rome, or when theologians supposed such shells on mountains to have been left on their slopes and summits by a rising deluge. Such theoretical explanations are unimpeachable in their philosophic spirit, until further observation may prove them

1 Hamilton in As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 344; Colebrooke, ibid. vol. iv. p. 385; Earl in Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 682; vol. iv. p. 9. See Renaudot, Travels of Two Mahommedans,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 183.

2 F. Buckland, Curiosities of Nat. Hist.' 3rd series, vol. ii. p. 39.

to be unsound. Their disastrous effect on the historic conscience of mankind only begins when the inference is turned upside down, to be told as a recorded fact.

In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine of miracles in its special bearing on mythology. The mythic wonder-episodes related by a savage tale-teller, the amazing superhuman feats of his gods and heroes, are often to his mind miracles in the original popular sense of the word, that is, they are strange and marvellous events; but they are not to his mind miracles in a frequent modern sense of the word, that is, they are not violations or supersessions of recognized laws of nature. Exceptio probat regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception is to imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes neither rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought up to use a different canon of evidence, will calmly reject this savage's most revered ancestral traditions, simply on the ground that they relate events which are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the course of culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized stages. What concerns us here is that there is an important department of legend which this change in public opinion, generally so resistless, left to a great extent unaltered. In the middle ages the long-accepted practice rose to its height, of allowing the mere assertion of supernatural influence by angels or devils, saints or sorcerers, to override the rules of evidence and the results of experience. The consequence was that the doctrine of miracles became as it were a bridge along which mythology travelled from the lower into the higher culture. Principles of myth-formation belonging properly to the mental state of the savage, were by its aid continued in strong action in the civilized world. Mythic episodes which Europeans would have rejected contemptuously if told of savage deities or heroes, only required to be adapted to appropriate local details, and to be set forth as miracles in the life of some superhuman per

sonage, to obtain as of old a place of credit and honour in history.

From the enormous mass of available instances in proof of this let us take two cases belonging to the class of geological myths. The first is the well-known legend of St. Patrick and the serpents. It is thus given by Dr. Andrew Boorde in his description of Ireland and the Irish in Henry VIII.'s time. Yet in Ierland is stupendyous thynges; for there is neyther Pyes nor venymus wormes. There is no Adder, nor Snake, nor Toode, nor Lyzerd, nor no Euyt, nor none such lyke. I haue sene stones the whiche haue had the forme and shap of a snake and other venimus wormes. And the people of the countre sayth that suche stones were wormes, and they were turned into stones by the power of God and the prayers of saynt Patryk. And Englysh marchauntes of England do fetch of the erth of Irlonde to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll venimus wormes." In treating this passage, the first step is to separate pieces of imported foreign myth, belonging properly not to Ireland, but to islands of the Mediterranean; the story of the earth of the island of Krete being fatal to venomous serpents is to be found in Ælian, and St. Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one of the Lerins opposite Cannes)3 seems to take precedence of the Irish saint. What is left after these deductions is a philosophic myth accounting for the existence of fossil ammonites as being petrified snakes, to which myth a historical position is given by claiming it as a miracle, and ascribing it to St. Patrick. The second myth is valuable for the historical and geological evidence which it incidentally preserves. At the celebrated ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis at Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli, the marble columns, encircled half-way up by borings of lithodomi, stand to prove that the ground of the temple must have been formerly submerged 1 Andrew Boorde, 'Introduction of Knowledge,' ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early Eng. Text Soc. 1870, p. 133.

2 Ælian, De Nat. Animal, v. 2, see 8. 3 Acta Sanctorum Bolland. Jan. xvi.

many feet below the sea, and afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably silent as to the events demonstrated by this conclusive geological evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Roman emperors from the second to the third century, and the mention of its existence in ruins in the 16th century, no documentary information was till lately recognized. It has now been pointed out by Mr. Tuckett that a passage in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, dating apparently more or less before the end of the 9th century, mentions the subsidence of the temple, ascribing it to a miracle of St. Paul. The legend is as follows: And when he (Paul) came out of Messina he sailed to Didymus, and remained there one night. And having sailed thence, he came to Pontiole (Puteoli) on the second day. And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to Pontiole. And some of Peter's disciples having been found there, and having received Paul, exhorted him to stay with them. And he stayed a week in hiding, because of the command of Cæsar (that he should be put to death). And all the toparchs were waiting to seize and kill him. But Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his shipmaster's dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized him and beheaded him, and sent his head to Cæsar. . . . And Paul, being in Pontiole, and having heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded, being grieved with great grief, gazing into the height of the heaven, said: "O Lord Almighty in Heaven, who hast appeared to me in every place whither I have gone on account of Thine only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and followed His word." He said to them, therefore, "Follow me." And going forth from Pontiole with those who had believed in the word of God, they came to a place called Baias (Baia), and looking up with their eyes,

they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the sea. . . . And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been swallowed up with all its multitude."1

Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights' story, which at first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older than the date when the Thousand and One Nights' were edited. When, in Henry of Veldeck's 12th century poem, Duke Ernest and his companions sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and are themselves dragged in below it among many a work of keels,' whose masts stand like a forest. Turning from tale-tellers to grave geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at sea. This quaint notion is to be found in 'Sir John

1' Acts of Peter and Paul,' trans. by A. Walker, in Ante-Nicene Library, vol. xvi. p. 257; F. F. Tuckett in 'Nature,' Oct. 20, 1870. See Lyell, 'Principles of Geology,' ch. xxx.; Phillips, 'Vesuvius,' p. 244.

2 Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.' vol. i. pp. 161, 217; vol. iii. p. 78; Hole, 'Remarks on the Ar. N.' p. 104; Heinrich von Veldeck, Herzog Ernst's von Bayern Erhöhung, &c.' ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see Ludlow, 'Popular Epics of Middle Ages,' p. 221.