mena, and actually confer on them the appellation of Zulu (or Zeus). There is indeed nothing in which Zeus differs essentially from Manabozho of North American mythology, from Krishna of the Hindus, from Maui of the Polynesians, from Quawteaht of the rude Ahts, or from Kutka of the still ruder Kamschadals. The stories told of one may be more refined than those told of another, but in no case are they more than names, serving as convenient centres for the grouping of memorable feats or fictions. Such names serve also, when once men have begun to reflect on the arts or customs of their lives, as sufficient explanations of their origin; and just as we find the institution of marriage attributed in China, or Greece, or India to some mythical hero, so we find the discovery of fire and light, or the invention of remarkable arts, duly ascribed to some hypothetical originator. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, in Thlinkeet Indian mythology, Yehl, played the part of Prometheus in procuring fire for the use of men. From seeing a spider make its web, Manabozho invented the art of making fishing nets; and Kutka (who, like Manabozho, is also in some sense the maker of all things) taught the Kamschadals how to build huts, how to catch birds, and beasts, and fish.1 American mythology abounds in culture-heroes, mythical personages who taught men useful arts and laws, and left, in the reverence attached to their memory, a quasi-religious system for their posterity.2 These too have been resolved into observation of the phenomena of the sun or the dawn. Manabozho or Michabo, the ancestor of the Algonquins, whose name literally means the Great Hare, and conferred peculiar respect on the clan who bore it as their totem, means in reality (according to this theory) the Great Light, the Spirit of Dawn, or under another aspect the North-west Wind; the confusion between the hare and dawn being supposed to have arisen from a root wab, which gave two words, one meaning white and the other hare, so that what was originally told of the White Light came to be told of a Hare, and what was at first but a personification of natural phenomena became a tissue of inconsistent absurdities. Possible, however, as such a solution may be, it is easier to believe that the stories of the Great Hare have grown round a man, called, in complete accordance with American custom, after the hare, and once a famous sorcerer or warrior like Mannan Mac Lear; for in all the more recent traditions of him, there is much more of the magician or shaman than of the wind or the dawn. He 2 Bancroft, v. 23. 3 Steller, 253-4. Brinton, Myths of the New World. turns at will into a wolf or an oak stump, he converses with all creation, he outwits serpents by his cunning, he has a lodge from which he utters oracles; nor as brother of the winds, by reason of his swiftness, is there any incongruity in the idea that since his death. he is the director of storms, and resides in the region of his brother, the North wind. It is curious that he is swallowed by the king of the fish, in this resembling in Aryan mythology Pradyumna, the son of Vishnu, who after being swallowed by a fish is ultimately restored to life, or in Polynesian mythology Maui, who is rescued by the sky from the embrace of the jelly fish. Maui, like Tell, Sigurd, Hercules, and others, has recently been discovered to be the sun, the fish which swallows him signifying really the earth; for does not the earth swallow the sun every night, and is not the sun only freed by the eastern sky in the morning ?2 For those whom such an explanation may please Manabozho may therefore also mean the sun, and be added to the list of solar divinities. Samé, the great name of Brazilian legend, came across the ocean from the rising sun; he had power over the elements and tempests; the trees of the forests would recede to make room for him, the animals used to crouch before him; lakes and rivers became solid for him; and he taught the use of agriculture and magic. Like him, Bochica, the great lawgiver of the Muyscas and son of the sun, he who invented for them the calendar and regulated their festivals, had a white beard, a detail in which all the American culture heroes agree. It is not, however, on this particular feature, so much as on their whiteness in general that stress has been laid to identify them all with the great White Light of Dawn. Of Quetzalcoatl, of Mexico, Dr. Brinton says, "Like all the dawn heroes he, too, was represented of white complexion, clothed in long white robes." The white is the emphatic thing about them. So the name Viracocha of the Peruvians, translated by Oviedo, "the foam of the sea," is, we are to believe, a metaphor: "the dawn rises above the horizon as the snowy foam on the surface of the lake." 4 But Peruvian tradition was confused as to whether Viracocha was the highest god and creator of the world, or only the first Inca, and such confusion between humanity and divinity, which is everywhere the normal result of the deification of the dead, is at least a more natural account of the origin of his worship than a fancied resemblance between the ■ Vishnu Purana, 575. 2 Schirren, 144. Maui wird im Meere geformt, von einem Fisch verschluckt, mit diesem ans Land geworfen und herausgeschnitten. Der Fisch ist die Erde welche die Sonne zur Nacht verschlingt; der Himmel im Osten befreit die Sonne aus der Erde. 3 Bancroft, v. 23. • Brinton, 180. sea-foam and the dawn.' Heitsi Eibip, whom the Namaqua Hottentots call their Great Father and on whose graves they throw stones for luck, so far resembles a solar hero that he is believed to have come like Samé from the East; yet, though much that is wonderful already attaches to his memory, he has not yet thrown off his human personality, but is known to have been merely a sorcerer of great fame; so that in his deification we have almost living evidence of the process here assumed to have operated widely in the formation of the world's mythology. An elemental explanation has been applied with such uniform effect, first to Aryan and then to Polynesian and American mythology, that in the rejection of it there may be danger of carrying opposing theories too far. There are, however, certain obvious limits, nor, if we doubt whether man in a primitive state really had the poetical views of nature so generally claimed for him, need we deny to the direct exercise of his imagination all share in the construction of mythology. Take, for instance, this typical Aryan passage, "By the early Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As a fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top, the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be required of him. Hence to this day, among ignorant people, the howling of a dog is supposed to portend a death in the family." When we find that a dog's howling portends the death of its master among the Nubians, and is regarded as a dreaded omen by the Kamschadals,5 we may safely reject the Aryan pedigree of the superstition, nor go any further for its explanation than the nature of the sound itself. But though Aryan mythology may be taken to have grown, like any other, round human personalities, and though popular superstitions are in many instances the primary products of the laws of psychology, ranking rather among the sources than the debris of mythology, there is proof from the fairylore of savages that some have so far advanced in thought as to be not incapable of personifying abstract ideas. Dr. Rink alludes to the tendency of the Esquimaux to give figurative explanations of things, to personify, for instance, human qualities, just as they are personified in the "Pilgrim's Progress." " The Chippewa Indians personified sleep as Weeng, once seen in a tree in a wood as a giant insect, making a murmuring sound with its wings, and generally conceived as causing sleep by employing a number of little fairies to 1 Waitz (Anthropologie, iv. 394, 448, 455) adopts the view of the human origin of Viracocha. 2 Bleek, Hottentot Fables, 75. 6 3 Fiske, 35, 76. 4 Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, ii. 326. • Steller, 279. Rink, Tales &c. of the Esquimaux, 90. beat drowsy foreheads with their tiny clubs. And the Odjibwas, with a fancy which has been so poetically preserved by Longfellow, identified Winter with an old hoary-headed man called Peboan, Spring with a young man of quick step and rosy face called Segwun. 2 The testimony, therefore, afforded by the observation of modern savage races as to the growth of mythology discloses several ways in which, as it is being formed now, we may infer that it was formed thousands of years ago. The evidence of Steller that the Kamschadals explained everything to themselves according to the liveliness of their fancy, letting nothing escape their examination,3 accords with evidence of other races to the effect that some intellectual curiosity enters as a constituent into the lowest human intelligence, giving birth to explanations which are as absurd to us as they are natural to their original framers. A ready capacity for invention is no rare trait of the savage character. Sir G. Grey found that the capability of Australian natives to invent marvels and wonders was proportioned to the quantity of food he offered to them; and in the fondness of the Koranna Hottentots, as they sit round their evening fires, of relating fictitious adventures, lies a source of legendary lore which is not likely to be limited to South Africa, and is probably aided there and elsewhere by the knowledge, common to so many savage tribes, of the preparation of intoxicating drinks. To these sources of mythology may be added the help supplied by dreams to the elaboration of fiction, the misconceptions effected in traditions by the language of flattery, or perhaps by the language of affection, and, lastly, the tendency, probably consequent on such confusion, to personify things or even abstract ideas; and the wonder will no longer be that the mythology of the different races of the world displays so much uniformity, but that uniformity within limited ranges should ever have been taken as a proof of a common ethnological origin. J. A. FARRER. 2 Hiawatha, Canto xxi. 6 Algic Researches, ii. 226. Steller, 267. "Die Italmanes geben nach ihrer ungemein lebhaften Phantasie von allen Dingen Raison, und lassen nicht das geringste ohne Critic vorbei." Yet they had neither reverence nor names for the stars, calling only the Great Bear the moving star, 281. ▲ Travels in Australia, i. 261. Thompson, South Africa, ii, 34. • Schiefner, Kalewala, 129, An old man says to a bride : "Seinen Mond nannt' dich der Vater, Sonnenschein nannt' dich die Mutter, Wasserschimmer dich der Bruder." If other people besides the Finns thus call their daughters Moon, Sunshine, or Water-glimmer, it is easy to see how the departure of Sunshine as a bride might be explained afterwards as a myth of the dawn, and similarly anything else that happened to her. UNPUBLISHED EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF DR. JOHNSON. "ON N Monday, March 27 [1775], I breakfasted with him [Dr. Johnson] at Mr. Strahan's," says Boswell; and then soon after continues: "Mr. Strahan had taken a poor boy from the country as an apprentice, upon Johnson's recommendation. Johnson, having inquired after him, said, 'Mr. Strahan, let me have five guineas on account, and I'll give this boy one. Nay, if a man recommends a boy, and does nothing for him, it is sad work. him down.' "I followed him into the court-yard, behind Mr. Strahan's house; and there I had a proof of what I had heard him profess, that he talked alike to all. Some people tell you that they let themselves down to the capacity of their hearers. I never do that. I speak, uniformly, in as intelligible a manner as I can.' "Well, my boy, how do you go on?' 'Pretty well, Sir; but they are afraid I a'nt strong enough for some parts of the business.' JOHNSON: Why, I shall be sorry for it; for when you consider with how little mental power and corporeal labour a printer can get a guinea a week, it is a very desirable occupation for you. Do you hear? Take all the pains you can; and if this does not do, we must think of some other way of life for you. There's a guinea.' "Here was one of the many, many instances of his active benevolence. At the same time, the slow and sonorous solemnity with which, while he bent himself down, he addressed a little, thick, short-legged boy, contrasted with the boy's awkwardness and awe, could not but excite some ludicrous emotions." The "little, thick, short-legged boy" who looked up with "awkwardness and awe" to the uncouth and slovenly mass of mortality looming above him, and listened to the words which with "slow and sonorous solemnity" were addressed to him, was one William Davenport, the orphan son of a clergyman of the Church of England, the Rev. J. Davenport, of Norton. The William Strahan with whom he was apprenticed was one of the most eminent printers |