THEIR PRIMITIVE VOCABULARY.

5

had kept pace with the progress of their observation and experience, and was in fact an automatic register of that progress. It was a highly figurative vocabulary, for that is a necessary condition of every primitive tongue. In all stages of language, even in that at which it has become "a dictionary of faded metaphors," comparison is the ready handmaid of nomenclature. A piece of machinery, for instance, is called a spinning-jenny, because it does the work of a spinning woman. To call things which we have never seen before by the name of that which most nearly resembles them, is a practice of every day life. That children at first call all men father,' and all women 'mother,' is an observation as old as Aristotle. The Romans gave the name of Lucanian ox to the elephant, and camelopardus to the giraffe, just as the New Zealanders are stated to have called horses large dogs. The astonished Caffers gave the name of cloud to the first parasol which they had seen; and similar instances might be adduced almost indefinitely. They prove that it is an instinct, if it be not a necessity, to borrow for the unknown the names already used for things known."*

In this way the primitive Aryans composed their vocabulary of things seen in the sky, and so it

* Farrar "On the Origin of Language," p. 119.

became for all succeeding generations an inexhaustible repertory of the raw material of myths, legends and nursery tales. The sun, for instance, was a radiant wheel, or a golden bird, or an eye, an egg, a horse; and it had many other names. At sunrise or sunset, when it appeared to be squatting on the water, it was a frog; and out of this name, at a later period, when the original metaphor was lost sight of, there grew a Sanscrit story, which is found also in German and Gaelic with a change of gender. The Sanscrit version is that "Bhekî (the frog) was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife. She consented, on condition that he should never show her a drop of water. One day, being tired, she asked the king for water; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bhekî disappeared." * That is to say, the sun disappeared when it touched the water.

Clouds, storms, rain, lightning and thunder, were the spectacles that above all others impressed the imagination of the early Aryans, and busied it most in finding terrestrial objects to compare with their ever varying aspect. The beholders were at home on the earth, and the things of the earth were com

* "Saturday Review," Feb. 23, 1861.

PRIMITIVE VIEWS OF NATURE.

7

paratively familiar to them; even the coming and going of the celestial luminaries might often be regarded by them with the more composure because of their regularity; but they could never surcease to feel the liveliest interest in those wonderful meteoric changes, so lawless and mysterious in their visitations, which wrought such immediate and palpable effects, for good or ill, upon the lives and fortunes of the beholders. Hence these phenomena were noted and designated with a watchfulness and a wealth of imagery which made them the principal groundwork of all the Indo-European mythologies and superstitions. The thunder was the bellowing of a mighty beast, or the rolling of a wagon. The lightning was a sinuous serpent, or a spear shot straight athwart the sky, or a fish darting in zigzags through the waters of heaven. The stormy winds were howling dogs or wolves; the ravages of the whirlwind that tore up the earth were the work of a wild boar. Light clouds were webs spun and woven by celestial women, who also drew water from the fountains on high, and poured it down as rain. The yellow light gleaming through the clouds was their golden hair. A fast-scudding cloud was a horse flying from its pursuers. Other clouds were cows, whose teeming udders refreshed and replenished the

8

ARYAN VIEWS OF NATURE.

earth; or they were buck goats, or shaggy skins of beasts dripping water. Sometimes they were towering castles, or mountains and caverns, rocks, stones, and crags,* or ships sailing over the heavenly waters. In all this, and much more of the same kind, there was not yet an atom of that symbolism which has commonly been assumed as the starting point of all mythology. The mythic animals, for example, were, for those who first gave them their names, no mere images or figments of the mind; they were downright realities, for they were seen by men who were quick to see, and who had not yet learned to suspect any collusion between their eyes and their fancy. These "natural philosophers"-to speak with Touchstone-had in full perfection the faculty that is given to childhood, of making everything out of anything, and of believing with a large and implicit faith in its own creations.

The beings whom they first recognised as gods were those that were visible to them in the sky, and these were for the most part beasts, birds, and reptiles. Some of the latter appeared to combine the flight of birds with the form of creeping things,

* Nearly all the Sanscrit words for rock, stone, cliff, crag, &c., signify also cloud.

Schwartz, U. M. 12.

and then the heavenly fauna was enriched with a new genus, the winged dragon. Glimpses of other human forms besides those of the cloud women were seen from time to time, or their existence was surmised, and gradually the divine abodes became peopled with gods in the likeness of men, to whom were ascribed the same functions as belonged to the bird, beast, and snake-gods. By-and-bye, when all these crude ideas began to shape themselves into something like an orderly system, the surplusage of gods was obviated by blending the two kinds together, or subjecting the one to the other. Thenceforth the story ran that the gods changed themselves from time to time into animal forms, or that each of them had certain animals for his favourites and constant attendants in heaven; and these were sacred to him on earth.

Let us not think too meanly of the intelligence of our simple ancestors because they could regard brutes as gods. It was an error not peculiar to them, but common to all infant races of men. The early traditions of every people point back to a period when man had not yet risen to a clear conception of his own pre-eminence in the scale of created life. The power of discerning differences comes later into play than that of perceiving resemblances, and the