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speculation had recourse to a myth; and every organism was fashioned by an interior æon, to which the volition of the monad was, for the time being, subject; and thus was built up out of living atoms, through the sleepless energy of the vital æon, an approximation to the ideal of the organism, or specics to which the organism belonged. A man was a mass of living molecules governed by an æon, physically; mentally, a soul which might have belonged to some remote ancestor, but was, more likely, that of some inferior animal promoted to humanity for good behavior; for believers in the transmigration myth regarded natural history in its gradations as a series, in passing through which souls were developed into humanity, and, at last, into angelhood; and, if, having passed once through the series, they proved in humanity quite intractible, they were sent back to try it over.

It occasionally happened that an æon had a fancy for the nondescript, and would indulge its freak by putting the atoms in a somewhat nondescript form; and thus there came about a goblin world of griffins, dragons, pigmies, and other shapes belonging to no species, and, consequently, supposed to be the prisons of souls having committed some unpardonable enormity. The myth of the basilisk belongs to an order of fictions referable to the stem-idea of goblin-genesis. According to the old superstition, when a rooster was seven years old he would lay an egg, which, upon iucubation, would produce a creature, half-serpent and half orginal stock, termed a basilisk, and so poisonous as to kill any creature it looked at. The easiest way to kill it was to hold a mirror before it, when, by reflection of its own deadly look, it would-so ran the legend -drop dead of its own hideousness. Hoary as the hills, but still prevalent in some parts of the world, this superstition is traceable to a relationship with the Arabic myth of the evil eye-Ain rab-common in Eastern Asia, and carried hither and thither by that strange race of juifs errants, the gypsies.

Absurd as seem these myths of primitive man, they have, through the transmutation of ages, been invested with togas of scientific phrase—have had, in a word, a sort of transmigration into other bodies of expression; the living atom having

been translated into Greek by protoplasm; the soul itself into ' an eternally transmigrating molecular motion, which climbs and descends in the same endless succession of cycles.

The living-atom myth, which favors the basis of the protoplasmic hypothesis, suffered little modification previous to the dawn of modern histology, when Buffon reproduced it in his theory of organic molecules, according to which vitality was eternally vested in certain indestructible particles of matter, constituting the physical basis of all organic beings, and having certain properties and inalienable activities differentiating them from' matter not living. Dead matter could not be transformed into living; and living matter, having vitality as an inherent activity, could not die. Progress takes a few steps; and, presto, the bodily part of Buffon's myth is defunct, the soul of it entering into the newer body of protoplasm or proteine, which passes from dead to living, and vice versa, with the utmost possible ease: the old æon reappearing in the law of modality determining that an acorn shall produce an oak, not a maple; while the poor soul of the ancient is metamorphosed into a molecular motion, now sinking into unconsciousness in the great tomb of inorganic matter, now rising into consciousness again in the molecular-material bubble, termed humanity. Thus man is converted into a sort of molecular thinking cap, very useful to matter as a self-register of its states and fluctuations.

But, by way of giving the botanical kingdom an opportunity to make itself useful in the world, in this new mythbegging the pardon of several learned professors-it has been converted into a manufactory of organic monads intended for the nutrition of the animal kingdom. Emerson may repeat as he likes

"For if the eye was made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for being."

But beauty is simply protoplasm put up in very pretty and tempting packages, like bon-bons at a confectionery depot; and violets blossom in the grass for the very purpose of inducing animals to eat them, and the grass with them. To apply

the logic of Rocoles, who avers that the lion might as well have been called a monkey, it is obvious that the rose or lily might better have been a cabbage, since neither is anything more than protoplasm running to waste in the way of the beautiful. But, granting that the end of all beauty is to be cooked, eaten, and digested, what becomes of Gray's pleasant fiction of theology:

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air ?"

Beauty has been beheaded for treason occasionally in centuries past; but now beauty is treason to the great purpose of vegetation, the production of palatable monads to be digested, assimilated, and made to minister to the molecular activity of thinking.

A single myth traceable to the old fiction of æons governing the nucleation of organic bodies, is still accepted in some quarters. Swedenborg taught that the spirit gave shape to the body, and that, if any member, as, for example, a leg, was lost, the perfect spiritual shape was still preserved; and, in confirmation of the idea, cases are instanced in which persons, having suffered the amputation of a limb, have been conscious of pain, in the toes, for instance, after the amputation had been performed. Swedenborg gave man two bodies -one, substantial and inner, which could not suffer mutilation; the other corporeal and exterior, constituting a sort of mortal coil which was shuffled off in articulo mortis. Hence, though the material body might be despoiled of a leg or an arm by Surgeon Sawbones, the invisible and substantial body was at the mercy of no instruments Sawbones could command.

The singular power of reproducing lost parts possessed by certain animals has been frequently quoted as triumphant proof, not only of the existence of the substantial body, but of its capacity, under certain conditions, of renewing amputated members. Cut off the legs, tail, jaws of a newt, separately or all together; and, as was long since proved by Spallanzani, the animal reproduces legs, tail, and jaws exactly in

the form of those cut off.

Presto, the mutilated newt reappears as good a newt as before, with legs, tail, and jaws as exactly like those which have been cut off as if some mysterious artist had modelled them with the originals before him.

There is a myth still prevalent in some parts of New England, that serpents have the same power of redintegration. Cut a snake in two, and put the pieces any attainable distance apart; and, according to the superstition, the head, with part appertaining to it, will hunt up the lost remainder, readjust it properly, and lie still until the vis medicatrix has knitted the two together. Hence, in killing a snake, it is customary to make sure of so bruising the head as to put the contingency of redintegration quite out of the question. The age of this superstition is a problem of impossible solution. Possibly it is derived from the old promise-"The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." Possibly the old promise itself employs metaphorically the terms of a myth developed pending the Eden ages of primitive man.

The serpent has always had a mysterious satanic association with the preternatural, which is forcibly illustrated in the myth of the temptation; notably so in the myth attributing to it powers of fascination; but there is a New England myth of spontaneous generation concerning the hairsnake, which is worth noting. It is supposed that a hair from a horse's tail, being left in water for a few hours, is turned into a minute, thread-like serpent endowed with the power of propagating its kind; and this writhing, active little reptilian, supposedly thus generated, is termed the hair-snake.

The reader has now traced the gradual resolution, through almost unnumbered centuries, of a few primitive fictions into positive physical sciences. In like manner, the Greek fiction of an upper ether affords the basis of the undulatory hypothesis of light—itself a modern myth of rather imaginative

cast.

Take another phase of the primeval pantheism of the world-soul; considering it from the poetic stand-point. To ancient man the conception of volition was practically un

limited. A tree, a stone had something of the God in it. The music of the spheres was caught and repeated in the harmony of things earthly; and earth answered note for note to the melodies of the celestial. Man as poet bent his ear, heard, and reproduced the deep songs of the volitions that moved and breathes about him and above; and music was the one language in common between humanity and the hosts, unseen but not unheard, that encompassed it about.

It has been supposed that this ancient application of the word music to the waving of trees, the nodding of blossoms-in short, to all the ephemera of beauty-was not associated with the notion of sound. Again, as in the instance of the "music of the spheres," modern acumen is at fault. An old English writer apprehends the ancient conception more correctly in a quaint apothegm as to the origin of music: "The verie source, and, so to speake, springeheade of all musicke,” remarks he, "is the verie pleasante sounde that the trees make when they growe." Mrs. Browning embalms the

same fancy in verse of the quaintest deliciousness:

"The divine impulsion cleaves

In dim music to the leaves

Dropt and lifted, dropt and lifted."

So, too, Poe, in a personification under the name of Ligeia:

"Ligeia. Ligeia,

My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run!
Say, is it thy will

On the breezes to top,

Or, capriciously still

Like the lone albatross,
Incumbent on night,

As she on the air,
To direct with delight

All the harmony there ?"

But are not these operations of nature really soundless? Soundless! Not so, except from the dulness of human hearing. The strange, oppressive stillness of the tropical forest at noonday, intimates a learned professor, is due only to the

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