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of the blood of Adonis. A rock near the Island of Corfu bore and still bears the resemblance of a vessel under sail; the ancients adapted the story to the phenomenon, and recognised in it the Phæacian ship in which Ulysses returned to his country, converted into stone by Neptune for having carried the slayer of his son Polyphemus. A more extensive acquaint ance with the ocean has shown that this appearance is not unique; a similar one on the coast of Patagonia has more than once deceived both French and English navigators; and Captain Hardy, in his recent "Travels in Mexico," has recorded another near the shores of California.† A similar instance is afforded by the Chimæra, the solution of which enigma, as given by Ovid, is so fully substantiated by the very intelligent British officer who surveyed the Caramania a few years since. Scylla, the sea-monster, which devoured six of the rowers of Ulysses, M. Salverte is tempted to regard as an overgrown polypus magnified by the optical power of poetry: "In the enumeration of plants possessing magical properties, Pliny mentions three, which, according to Pythagoras, have the property of congealing water. Elsewhere, without having recourse to magic, he assigns to hemp an analogous quality. According to him, the juice of this plant poured into water, becomes suddenly inspissated and congealed-it is probable enough that he indicated a species of mallow, the hempleaved marshmallow, the Althaea Canuabina of Linnæus, of which the very mucilaginous juice produces this effect to a certain point, and which effect may also be obtained from every vegetable as rich in mucilage." "An American naturalist affirms, that at the approach of any danger, the young of the rattle-snake take refuge in the mouth of the mother. A similar example might have led the ancients to believe that some animals bring their young into the world through the mouth. They will have drawn a precipitate and absurd conclusion from a true observation." In "the ants larger than foxes" of Herodotus, who discover the gold intermingled with the sand, may be traced the Formica-Leo or Myrmeleon of modern entomology; and while Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 177), and Virgil (Georg. ii. 120), represent the Seres as collecting silk from the trees which bear it, there is nothing but a confusion between the natural product of the

The plot of a popular piece at the Adelphi Theatre, entitled "The Flying Dutchman," is founded on a similar appearance at the Cape of Good Hope, connected with a tradition which has been long current there among the Dutch colonists.

tree and the deposit left by animals which feed thereon. In this instance the equivoque has occasioned an error, in another it might have given rise to a prodigy. In the plant Latace, which, according to Pliny (xxvi. 4), defrayed wheresover they went the expenses of the envoys of the Persian king, may be discerned a symbol of office; and in the cab of pigeons' dung which, during the siege of Samaria, sold for five pieces of silver (2 Kings, vi. 25), may be found a small measure of grey peas, which still bear among the Arabs that repulsive designation. We shall cite but one more instance; "such is reported to have been the strength of Milo of Crotona, that when standing upon a flat discus no one was able to remove him, nor detach from his left hand a pomegranate, which still was not grasped sufficiently tight to crush it, nor separate the closed fingers of his outstretched hand." "Milo," says a writer versed in the usages and emblems of religion," was in his own country highpriest of Juno. His statue, placed at Olympia, represented him according to the sacred rite standing on a small round buckler, and holding a pomegranate, the fruit of a tree dedicated to the goddess; the fingers of his right hand were extended, pressed together and even united; it is thus the ancient statuaries always formed them. "Philost. Vit. Appollon. iv. 3.” The vulgar explained by marvellous stories an imperfection of art, and mysterious representations of which the sense was forgotten." But for examples of this sort we are not exclusively confined to ancient writings; the errors to which the figured calendars of the middle ages gave rise far surpass them in absurdity. Of saints and martyrs, and their legends, a more piquant selection might have been made by M. Salverte, though perhaps not of equal domestic interest: we shall venture to insert one which he has neglected, that deserves to be more generally known. Saint Marinus and Saint Aster appear in the Romish Calendar of Saints for March 3, these names having been manufactured through ignorance out of a note in the ancient Roman calendar, which stated the time of the astronomical rising of marinus aster, the nautis infestus Orion.

The prodigies recorded by the ancients admit of a natural explanation, these accounts therefore cannot be accused of falsehood; nor ought we think their “ veracity any more to be suspected," says M. Salverte "regarding works of magic, which admit of explanation not less satisfactory. It will only be necessary to suppose that the priests possessed and kept secret the knowledge which was required

for operating their wonders." Nor should we fail to remark the different significations attached to the word miracle by the ancients and the moderns. With us, a miracle is the suspension or violation of the laws of nature and a miracle which can be explained upon physical principles ceases to be such. Whatever surpassed their comprehension was regarded by the ancients as a miracle, and every extraordi: nary degree of information attained by an individual, as well as any unlooked-for occurrence, was referred to some peculiar interposition of the Deity. Hence, among the ancients, the followers of different divinities, far from denying the miracles performed by their opponents, admitted their reality, but endeavoured to surpass them; thus in the "Life of Zoroaster," we find that able innovator frequently entering the lists with hostile enchanters, admitting but exceeding the wonderful works they performed; and thus, also, when the thirst of power, or of distinction, divided the sacerdotal colleges, similar trials of skill would ensue, the successful combatant being considered to derive his knowledge from the more powerful God. That the science on which each party depended was derived from experimental physics, may be proved. 1. By the conduct of the Thaumaturgists. 2. From what they themselves have said concerning magic; the genii invoked by the magicians, sometimes denoting physical or chemical agents employed, sometimes men who cultivated the science. 3. We may add that the magic of the Chaldeans comiprehended all the occult sciences.

Whatever was done by a magician had not the appearance of resulting from a power imparted by the deity, was not instantaneously performed, but required more or less previous preparation, the collection of plants, minerals, &c. the use of certain words, sometimes in one language, sometimes in another, according to the nation to which the temple belonged,

+ " Thaumaturgical" and "Thaumaturgy," are words with which Dr. Todd has enriched the English language, on the authority of Burton and Warion. We have ventured upon "Thaumaturgist" as a legitimate translation of the French "Thaumaturge" of M. Salverte" wonder-worker" would have been more correct. At a very recent meeting of the London Geological Society a paper was read, in which "psammitic" was substitnted for "sandy;" a discussion arose thereupon, and a member maintained that the "Saxon English" was fully adequate to express every idea for which classical compounds were so pedantically introduced; much dissent was expressed from such a proposition, and a book casually taken down was opened at a treatise "On the Impenetrability of Matter," and triumphantly handed to the Saxon advocate, who immediately returned it with the version, "On the unthoroughfursiveness of Stuff;" this was irresistible and conclusive.

in which the receipts to be employed had been originally prepared.

"The learned Moses Maimonides (More Nevochim, iii, 37), reveals to us that the first part of the magic of the Chaldeans was a knowledge of metals, plants, and animals. The second indicated the times when magical performances might be carried on, that is the periods when the season, the temperature of the air, the state of the atmosphere favoured the suc cess of physical and chemical operations, or permitted a well-informed and attentive man to predict a natural phenomenon always unexpected by the vulgar.”—“The third taught the actions, postures, words, intelligible and unintelligible which should accompany the proceedings of the thau. maturgist."-The mystery of magic disappears! Introduced into the sanctuary of occult sciences we see there only a school in which the different branches of natural science were taught. And we can admit, in a literal sense, all that mythology and history relate respecting men and women whom skilful instructors had invested with the possession of the secrets of magic, and who frequently showed themselves superior to their masters." There can be no doubt that a tacit or formal agreement existed between the various thaumaturgists to prevent the secrets of their science being exposed to vulgar eyes. It is among the priests, that are still to be found those, who practice on the credulity of mankind, by pretending to superhuman means of knowledge. The following is a recent instance in point. In the month of June, 1824. in a small village called Artes, near Hostalrich, about twelve leagues from Barcelona, a constitutionalist being at the point of death, his brother called on the curate, requesting him to come and administer the sacraments. The curate refused, saying your brother is a constitutionalist, that is to say, a villain, an impious wretch, an enemy to God and man-he is damned without mercy, and it is therefore useless for me to confess him."-" But who told you that my brother was damned?"-" God himself told me during the sacrifice of the mass, that your brother is damned to all the devils." It was in vain that the brother reiterated his entreaties, the curate was inexorable. A few days after the in dividual died, when his brother demanded for the body the rites of sepulture. The curate refused alleging, "the soul of your brother is now burning in hell, as I told you before. It would be in vain for me to take any trouble about interring his body, for during the night the devils will come and carry it away; and in forty days you yourself will meet the same

fate." The Spaniard, not giving implicit credit to this diabolical visit, watched during the night by the body of his brother, and with his pistol loaded. Between twelve and one o'clock a knock was heard at the door, and a voice exclaimed, "I command you to open in the name of the living God; open if not, your ruin is at hand." The Spaniard refusd to open, and shortly after he saw enter by the window, three able-bodied devils, covered with the skins of wild beasts, having the usual quantity of horns, claws, and spiked tails, who set about carrying the coffin containing the body; upon this the guardian fired and shot one devil dead, the others took to flight, he fired after them and wounded both, one of whom died in a few minutes, the other escaped. In the morning when the people went to church, there was no curate to officiate, and it was shortly after discovered, on examining the defunct devils, that one was the curate and the other the vicar; the wounded devil was the sacristan, who confessed the whole diabolical proceeding-the case was brought before the tribunal of Barcelona.

From the very nature of things, much that now serves for amusement must formerly have been appropriated to a higher destination. Ventriloquism is a case in point, affording a ready and plausible solution of oracular stones and oaks, of the reply which the river Nessus addressed to Pythagoras, ("Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. xxviii.") and of the tree which, at the eommand of the chief of the Gymnosophists, of Upper Egypt, spoke to Apollonius. "The voice," says "Philostratus, (Vit Ap. vi. 5.")-"was distinct but weak, and similar to the voice of a woman." But the oracles, at least if we ascend to their origin, were not altogether imposture. The pretended interpreters of the decrees of destiny were frequently plunged into a sort of de lirium, and when inhaling the fumes of some intoxicating drug or powerful gas, or drinking some beverage which produced a temporary suspension of the reason, the mind of the inquirer was pre disposed for feverish dreams; if priest craft were concerned in the interpretation of such dreams, or eliciting sense from the wild effusions of the disordered brain of the Pythoness, "science presided over the Investigation of the causes of this phrenzy, and the advantages which the Thauma turgists might derive from it." Jamblichus states, "De Mysteriis," c. xxix. that for obtaining a revelation from the deity in a dream, the youngest and most simple creatures were the most proper for succeeding; they were prepared for it by

magical invocations and fumigations of particular perfumes. Porphyry declares that these proceedings had an influence on the imagination; Jamblichus, that they rendered them more worthy of the inspiration of the deity; "this is saying the same thing in other words," is the comment of M. Salverte.

"The Thaumaturgist had but one end in view; to attain it he employed ine differently charlatanism, sleight of hand, a figurative style, natural prodigies, observations, reasoning, real science," but what was most efficacious was the religious, secret mystery in which the whole was involved. The certainty of obtaining a blind prostration of the understanding from ignorant votaries was as well understood by the priests of an iquity as by the modern potentate who "prefers good subjects to learned men”—an expression which conveys a more severe satire than his bitterest enemy would venture to pronounce. The inevitable consequences of this mystery, in process of time, were, first, that in the hands of the Thaumaturgists magical science degenerated, becoming reduced to practice devoid of theory, and of which, at last, the very formulæ were no longer comprehended, and the real facts on which they depended irretrievably lost. And, secondly, that from ignorance of the limits by which its power was circumscribed, the desire of discovering its secrets, and the habit of attributing the efficacy of these last to the ostensible practices employed, the grossest errors were generally circulated among the people. A circumstance which occurred rather more than sixty years since, may illustrate the first of these positions.

"A Prince San Severo, at Naples, cultivated chemistry with some success; he had, for example, the secret of penetrating marble with colour, so that each slab sawed from the block presented a repetition of the figure imprinted on its external surface. In 1761, he exposed some human skulls to the action of different reagents, and then to the heat of a glass furnace, but paying so little attention to his manner of proceeding, that he acknowledged he did not expect to arrive a second time at the same result. From the product he obtained a vapour, or rather a gas was evolved, which, kindling at the approach of a light, burned for several months without the matter appearing to die or diminish in weight. (The oxygen combined by the effect of combustion, more than replaced what was lost by vaporization.) San Severo thought he had found the impossible secret of the inextinguishable lamp; but he would not divulge his process, for fear that the vault

in which were interred the princes of his family, should lose the unique privilege with which he expected to enrich it, of being illuminated by a perpetual lamp. Had he acted like a philosopher of the present day, San Severo would have attached his name to the important discovery of the existence of phosphorus in the bones, and made public the process by which it might be obtained."

To elucidate, by a modern example, the second of the above consequences of the mystery which enveloped scientific knowledge, we shall mention a circumstance that happened, in 1828, to one of the philosophers of whom England is most justly proud. Many of our readers will have seen a small toy, called a glass spinner, invented in Edinburgh some three years back, and to be had of every optician. If this small machine, in shape resembling a brilliant diamond, about one inch in diameter on its largest face, be made to spin on a glass plate whereon water has been poured, by a little dexterous management it will never stop, and even ascend the inclined surface of the glass; this was exhibited in Germany by the individual in question, who fully succeeded in convincing a spectator (a mystic certainly, but one by no means deficient either in physical or mathematical knowledge), that this motion, contradicting apparently all the laws of mechanics, was occasioned by a spirit confined in the coloured glass. Place the evidence of the senses and reason in real or imaginary opposition to each other, and who can assign the result.

On the surface of the thermal waters of Baden, in Germany, and on the waters of Ischia, an island in the kingdom of Naples, zoogene is collected, a singular substance, resembling human flesh with the skin upon it, and which, when subjected to distillation, affords the same products as animal matter. M. Gimbernat ("Journal de Pharmacie," Avril 1821, p. 196), has also seen rocks covered with this substance, near the castle of Lepomena, and in the vallies of Sinigaglia and Negreponte. Here is the explanation of those showers of pieces of meat which figure in the num❤ ber of prodigies of antiquity.

Pliny (Hist. Nat." xi. 108) speaks of a fountain which discharged wine during seven days, and water the rest of the year. In one of the towns of Elis, during the annual feast of Bacchus, three empty urns were closed, and on being opened were full of wine. "By employing a machine,” says M. Salverte, "to which we give the name of Hero's fountain, although probably it was only described, aud not invented by this mathematician,

a more striking miracle might have been performed. Under the eyes of the spectator, the water passed into a reservoir would have been emitted changed into wine."

Great ingenuity and learning have been displayed by M. Salverte in investigating the effects which medicated beverages produce; to which he ascribes, and we think correctly, such magical slumbers as were produced in the Cave of Trophonius, when the votary, if he escaped with life, had his health irreparably injured, and the whole class of artificial dreams and visions, the effect of some powerful nar cotic acting upon the body after the mind had been predisposed for a certain train of ideas. Such is the connexion," ob serves M. Salverte, "between the body aud the mind, that the substances which strongly induce sleep frequently possess the property of confusing the understanding the berries of the belladona produce, when eaten, a furious madness, followed by sleep which lasts for twenty-four hours." Such drugs as produce mental stupefaction without impairing the physical powers, may have given rise to the ac counts of men being transformed into brutes, so frequent in what are denomi nated the fabulous writers, while the evanescent but exquisite joys of an opposite description, an anticipation of what im plicit obedience would insure them for ever, produced blind, furious, devoted adherents to any philosophical speculator who would venture to try so desperate an experiment.

:

"The savage Kamtschatkadale and the fierce Cossac have recourse to this intoxication (produced by the spirit of muchamore, a mushroom which grows in the country of the former), to dissipate their terrors when meditating assassina tions. (Kracheninikoff, "Descript. du Kamtschat.," part i, c. 14.) The extract of hemp, combined with opium, throws the blacks of Hindostan into ferocious madness; no crime stops-no danger tere rifies them. Neither did fear nor hu manity check, in the career of crime, the fanatics whom the Old Man of the Moun tain intoxicated with a preparation of hemp, of which the name hachiche had formed, for those whom it led astray, the name of assassins. (J. Harmer, Mines de l'Orient.) Long previously, Schedadben-ad, king of Arabia, wishing to be adored like a God, had collected in a garden, of which the name has remained proverbial in the east, all the joys of paradise, and shared them with the trusty followers whom he deigned to admit. (D'Herbelot Bibliot. Orient. Iram.) both cases we think that these gardens,

In

these enjoyments, existed only in dreams induced with young men habituated to simple and severe regimen by the unac customed usage of liqnors, suited to lull their feeble reason, and exalt their ardent imagination."

But while these effects could not be produced by any beverage without the votary being conscious that he was partaking it, the same effects might ensue from the use of fumigation, without awakening any suspicion or distrust. In the Orphic hymns a particular perfume is ordered for the invocation of each divinity.

"We learn from Herodotus, iv. 75, that the Scythians inebriated themselves by inhaling the vapoar of the seeds of a species of hemp thrown upon red-hot stones; modern medicine has observed, that the odour alone of the seeds of henbane, particularly when its power is augmented by heat, produces a choleric and querulous disposition in those who respire it. The "Dictionnaire de Médecine" (de l'Encyclopedie Méthodique, vii, Jusquiume) cites three instances which prove it; the most remarkable is that of a married pair, who, living in perfect harmony every where else, could never remain a few hours in the room where they worked, without quarrelling excessively. The apartment, of course, was thought to be bewitched, until there was discovered, in a considerable packet of the seeds of henbane placed near a stove, the source of their daily dissensions, which the individuals themselves were the first to lament, and which the removal of the poisonous substance put an end to.

The same effects that were produced by draughts and fumigations would ensue from the application of liniments, of "magical unctions," acting through the absorbent system, as if they had been introduced into the stomach: allusions to these ointments are constantly recurring in classical authors. Philostratus, in his life of Apollonius (iii. 5), states that the latter and his companions, before being admitted to the mysteries of the Indian sages, were rubbed over with so active an oil, that it appeared they were bathed with fire.

CHARLES X. IN HIS YOUTH.

SOME Curious facts, illustrative of the character of this prince and his elder brother, Louis XVIII., when young men, at the commencement of the French Revolution,

are given in the following passage, extracted from the "History of the Female Sex," by the late Professor Meiners, of Gottingen:

"Of the brothers of Louis XVI. Monsieur (Louis XVIII.) had been unpopular even before the Revolution, and the Count d'Artois (Charles X.) was universally hated on account of his extravagance, his barefaced profligacy, and his exorbitant pride. The sums which these two brothers of the king had drawn from the royal treasury at a time of the greatest public distress, amounting to twenty-eight millions of livres (1,150,000l. sterling) could not fail to excite the greatest indignation in the people. This indignation was increased by the consideration of the objects of their profusion, especially that of the Count d'Artois. This prince had, at different times, been allowed many hundred thousand livres for his stables. The count was accused of leading the queen into similar extravagances, of finding access through her means to the royal exchequer, and of rendering her as indifferent to the welfare of the people, and to the public opinion, as he was himself.

"He displayed his hanghty insolence not only towards the public, but also towards the sex, and even to females of the highest rank. Once at a masquerade he addressed the Duchess of Bourbon with the same impudent libertinism as if he had been speaking to a common prostitute. The insulted princess raised the fringe of the mask which concealed the features of the person who had used such improper language to her. As soon as she perceived that it was the Count d'Artois, she walked away without deigning to bestow on him a single reproach. The haughty prince, highly affronted at the behaviour of the duchess, hastened after her, and broke her mask upon her face, The princess quietly withdrew from the ball-room and would not even have complained of the ill treatment she had received, had not the Count d'Artois, to crown his revenge, thought fit to make public the insult which he had offered her. The princess, her husband, and her whole family, then appealed to the king. Louis called his brother an étourdi, and obliged him to make suitable apologies to the lady. A duel also took place between the Duke of Bourbon and Count d'Artois, in which, however, neither of the combatants sustained any injury."

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