 Part 50 of The Golden Bough being chapters 68 and 69. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser. Chapter 68 The Golden Bough Thus the view that Baldur's life was in the mistletoe is entirely in harmony with primitive modes of thought. It may indeed sound like a contradiction that if his life was in the mistletoe he should nevertheless have been killed by a blow from the plant. But when a person's life is conceived as embodied in a particular object with the existence of which his own existence is inseparably bound up and the destruction of which involves his own, the object in question may be regarded and spoken of indifferently as his life or his death as happens in the fairy tales. Hence if a man's death is in an object it is perfectly natural that he should be killed by a blow from it. In the fairy tales Koshche the Deathless is killed by a blow from the egg or the stone in which his life or death is secreted. The ogres burst when a certain grain of sand, doubtless containing their life or death is carried over their heads. The magician dies when the stone in which his life or death is contained is put under his pillow, and the Tartar hero is warned that he may be killed by the golden arrow or golden sword in which his soul has been stowed away. The idea that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe was probably suggested, as I have said, by the observation that in winter the mistletoe growing on the oak remains green while the oak itself is leafless. But the position of the plant, growing not from the ground but from the trunk or branches of the tree, might confirm this idea. Primitive man might think that like himself the oak spirit had sought to deposit his life in some safe place and for this purpose had pitched on the mistletoe, which, being in a sense neither on earth nor in heaven, might be supposed to be fairly out of harm's way. In a former chapter we saw that primitive man seeks to preserve the life of his human divinities by keeping them poised between earth and heaven as the place where they are least likely to be assailed by the dangers that encompass the life of man on earth. We can therefore understand why it has been the rule both of ancient modern folk medicine that the mistletoe should not be allowed to touch the ground. Were it to touch the ground its healing virtue would be gone. This may be a survival of the old superstition that the plant in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated should not be exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the earth. In an Indian legend which offers a parallel to the Balder myth that he would slay him neither by day nor by night, neither with staff nor with bow, neither with the palm of the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor with the dry. But he killed him in the morning twilight by sprinkling over him the foam of the sea. The foam of the sea is just such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety. It is therefore not surprising that the foam of the river should be the totem of a clan in India. Again the view that the mistletoe owes its mystic character partly to its not growing on the ground is confirmed by a parallel superstition about the mountain ash or rowan tree. In Jutland a rowan that is found growing out of the top of another tree is esteemed exceeding effective against witchcraft since it does not grow on the ground witches have no power over it. If it is to have its full effect it must be cut on ascension day. Hence it is placed over doors to prevent the ingress of witches. In Sweden and Norway also magical properties are ascribed to a flying rowan, Fleurgrin. That is to a rowan which is found growing not in the ordinary fashion on the ground but on another tree or on a roof or in a cleft of the rock where it has sprouted from seed scattered by birds. They say that a man who is out in the dark should have a bit of flying rowan with him to chew else he runs a risk of being bewitched and being unable to stir from the spot. Just as in Scandinavia the parasitic rowan has esteemed a counter charm to sorcery. So in Germany the parasitic mistletoe is still commonly considered a protection against witchcraft and in Sweden as we saw the mistletoe which is gathered on Midsummer Eve is attached to the ceiling of the house, the horse's stall or the cow's crib in the belief that this renders the troll powerless to injure man or beast. The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument called as death but that it contained his life is countenanced by the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition ran that the fate of the haze of Errol and his state in Perthshire near the Firth of Tay was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on a certain great oak. A member of the hay family has recorded the old belief as follows Among the low-country families the badges are now almost generally forgotten but it appears by an ancient manuscript and the traditions of a few old people in Perthshire that the badge of the haze was the mistletoe. There was formerly in the neighbourhood of Errol and not far from the Vulcan stone a vast oak of an unknown age and upon which grew a profusion of the plant. Many charms and legends were considered to be connected with the tree and the duration of the family of hay was said to be united with its existence. It was believed that a spreek of the mistletoe cut by a hay on all Hallowmass Eve with a new dirk and after surrounding the tree three times sun-wise and pronouncing a certain spell was a sure charm against all glamour or witchery and an infallible guard in the day of battle. A spray gathered in the same manner was placed in the cradle of infants and thought to defend them from being changed for elf-bearns by the fairies. Finally it was affirmed that when the root of the oak had perished the grass should grow in the hearth of Errol and a raven should sit in the falcon's nest. The two most unlucky deeds which could be done by one of the name of hay was to kill a white falcon and to cut down a limb from the oak of Errol. When the old tree was destroyed I could never learn. The estate has been sold out of the family of hay and of course it is said that the fatal oak was cut down a short time before. The old superstition is recorded in verses which are traditionally ascribed to Thomas the Rimer. While the mistletoe bats on Errol's ache and that ache stands fast the hees shall flourish and their good-gray hawk shall not flinch before the blast. But when the root of the ache decays and the mistletoe dwinds on its weathered breast the grass shall grow on Errol's hearth-stain and the corby-roop in the falcon's nest. It is not a new opinion that the golden bale was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with mistletoe but this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant or, more probably, his description was based on a popular superstition that at a certain time the mistletoe blazed out into a supernatural golden glory. The poet tells how two doves guiding Aeneas to the gloomy bale in whose depth grew the golden bale alighted upon a tree went shone a flickering gleam of gold as in the woods in winter cold the mistletoe a plant not native to its tree its green with fresh leaves and twines its yellow berries about the bowls such seemed upon the shady whole-moak the leafy gold so rustled in the gentle breeze the golden leaf Here Virgil definitely describes the golden bale as growing on a whole-moak and compares it with the mistletoe the inference is almost inevitable that the golden bale was nothing but the mistletoe seen through the haze of poetry or of popular superstition Now grounds have been shown for believing that the priest of the Arisian Grove the king of the wood personified the tree on which grew the golden bale hence if that tree was the oak the king of the wood must have been a personification of the oak spirit It is therefore easy to understand why before he could be slain it was necessary to break the golden bale as an oak spirit his life or death was in the mistletoe on the oak and so long as the mistletoe remained intact he like boulder could not die to slay him therefore it was necessary to break the mistletoe and probably as in the case of boulder to throw it at him and to complete the parallel it is only necessary to suppose that the king of the wood was formerly burnt dead or alive at the Midsummer Fire Festival which as we have seen was annually celebrated in the Arisian Grove the perpetual fire which burned in the Grove like the perpetual fire which burned in the temple of Vesta at Rome and under the oak at Romove was probably fed with the sacred oak wood and thus it would be in a great fire of oak that the king of the wood formally met his end at a later time as I have suggested his annual tenure of office was lengthened or shortened as the case might be by the rule which allowed him to live so long as he could prove his divine right by the strong hand but he only escaped the fire to fall by the sword thus it seems that at a remote age in the heart of Italy beside the sweet Lake of Nemi the same fiery tragedy was annually enacted which Italian merchants and soldiers were afterwards to witness among their rude kindred the Celts of Gaul and which if the Roman Eagles lived on Norway might have been found repeated with little difference among the barbarous Aryans of the north the right was probably an essential feature in the ancient Aryan worship of the oak it only remains to ask why was the mistletoe called the golden bow the whitest yellow of the mistletoe berries is hardly enough to account for the name for Virgil says that the bow was altogether golden stem as well as leaves perhaps the name may be derived from the rich golden yellow which a bow of mistletoe assumes when it has been cut and kept for some months the bright tint is not confined to the leaves but spreads to the stalks as well so that the whole branch appears to be indeed a golden bow Breton peasants hang up great bunches of mistletoe in front of their cottages and in the month of June these bunches are conspicuous for the bright golden tinge of their foliage in some parts of Brittany especially about Morbihan branches of mistletoe are hung over the doors of stables and buyers to protect the horses and cattle probably against witchcraft the yellow color of the withered bow may partly explain why the mistletoe has been sometimes supposed to possess the property of disclosing treasures in the earth for on the principles of homeopathic magic there is a natural affinity between a yellow bow and yellow gold this suggestion is confirmed by the analogy of the marvelous properties popularly ascribed to the mythical fernseed which is popularly supposed to bloom like gold or fire on Midsomer Eve thus in Bohemia it is said that on St. John's Day fernseed blooms with golden blossoms that gleam like fire now it is a property of this mythical fernseed that whoever has it or will ascend a mountain holding it in his hand on Midsomer Eve will discover a vein of gold or will see the treasures of the earth shining with a bluish flame in Russia they say that if you succeed in catching the wondrous bloom of the fern at midnight on Midsomer Eve you have only to throw it up into the air and it will fall like a star on the very spot where a treasure lies hidden in Brittany treasure seekers gather fernseed at midnight on Midsomer Eve and keep it till Palm Sunday of the following year then they strew the seed on the ground where they think a treasure is concealed to release peasants imagine that hidden treasures can be seen glowing like flame on Midsomer Eve and that fernseed gathered at this mystic season with the usual precautions will help to bring the buried gold to the surface in the Swiss canton of Freiburg people used to watch beside a fern on St. John's Night in the hope of winning a treasure brought to them in Bohemia they say that he who procures the golden bloom of the fern at this season has thereby the key to all hidden treasures and that if maidens will spread a cloth under the fast fading bloom red gold will drop into it and in the Tyrol and Bohemia if you place fernseed among money the money will never decrease however much of it you spend sometimes the fernseed is supposed to bloom on Christmas night and whoever catches it will become very rich in Styria they say that by gathering fernseed on Christmas night you can force the devil to bring you a bag of money thus on the principle of like by like fernseed is supposed to discover gold because it is itself golden and for a similar reason it enriches its possessor with an unfailing supply of gold but while the fernseed is described as golden it is equally described as glowing and fiery hence when we consider that two great days for gathering the fabulous seed are Midsummer Eve and Christmas that is the two solstices for Christmas is nothing but an old heathen celebration of the winter solstice we are led to regard the fiery aspect of the fernseed as primary and its golden aspect as secondary and derivative fernseed in fact would seem to be an emanation of the sun's fire of the two turning points of its course the summer and winter solstices this view is confirmed by a German story in which a hunter is said to have procured fernseed by shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon three drops of blood fell down which he caught in a white cloth and these blood drops were the fernseed here the blood is clearly the blood of the sun from which the fernseed is thus directly derived thus it may be taken as probable that the fernseed is golden because it is believed to be an emanation of the sun's golden fire now like fernseed the mistletoe is gathered either at Midsummer or at Christmas that is either at the summer or at the winter solstice and like fernseed it is supposed to possess the power of revealing treasures in the earth on Midsummer Eve people in Sweden make divining rods of mistletoe or of four different kinds of wood one of which must be mistletoe the treasure seeker places the rod on the ground after sundown and when it rests directly over treasure the rod begins to move as if it were alive now if the mistletoe discovers gold it must be in its character of the golden bough and if it is gathered at the solstices must not the golden bough like the golden fernseed be an emanation of the sun's fire the question cannot be answered with a simple affirmative we have seen old Aryans perhaps kindled the solstice and other ceremonial fires in part as sun charms that is with the intention of supplying the sun with fresh fire and as these fires were usually made by the friction or combustion of oak wood it may have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak in other words the oak may have seemed to him the original storehouse or reservoir of the fire which was from time to time drawn out to feed the sun but if the life of the oak was conceived to be in the mistletoe the mistletoe must on that view have contained the seed or germ of the fire which was elicited by friction from the wood of the oak thus instead of saying that the mistletoe was an emanation of the sun's fire it might be more correct to say that the sun's fire was regarded as an emanation of the mistletoe no wonder then that the mistletoe was a golden splendour and was called the golden bow probably however like fernseed it was thought to assume its golden aspect only at those stated times especially mid-summer when fire was drawn from the oak to light up the sun at Pulverbatch in Shropshire it was believed within living memory that the oak tree blooms on mid-summer eve and the blossom withers before daylight a maiden who wishes to know her lot in marriage should spread a white cloth under the tree at night and in the morning she will find a little dust which is all that remains of the flower she should place the pinch of dust under her pillow and then her future husband will appear to her in her dreams this fleeting bloom of the oak if I am right was probably the mistletoe in its character of the golden bow the conjecture is confirmed by the observation that in Wales a real sprig of mistletoe gathered on mid-summer eve is similarly placed under the pillow to induce prophetic dreams and further the mode of catching the imaginary bloom of the oak in a white cloth is exactly that which was employed by the druids to catch the real mistletoe when it dropped from the bow of the oak severed by the golden sickle as Shropshire borders on Wales the belief that the oak blooms on mid-summer eve may be Welsh in its immediate origin though probably the belief is a fragment of the primitive Arian creed in some parts of Italy as we saw peasants still go out on mid-summer morning to search the oak trees for the oil of St John which, like the mistletoe, heals all wounds and is perhaps the mistletoe itself in its glorified aspect thus it is easy to understand how a title like the golden bow so little descriptive of its usual appearance on the tree should have been applied to the seemingly insignificant parasite further we can perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was believed to possess the remarkable property of extinguishing fire and why in Sweden it is still kept in houses as a safeguard against conflagration its fiery nature marks it out on homeopathic principles as the best possible cure or preventive of injury by fire these considerations may partially explain why Virgil makes Ineos carry a glorified bow of mistletoe with him on his descent into the gloomy subterranean world the poet describes how at the very gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood and how the hero following the flight of two doves that lured him on wandered into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw a far-off through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the golden bow illuminating the matted bows overhead if the mistletoe as a yellow withered bow in the sad autumn woods was conceived to contain the seed of fire what better companion could a full-on wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bow that would be a lamp to his feet as well as a rod and staff to his hands armed with it he might boldly confront the dreadful specters that would cross his path on his adventurous journey hence when Ineas emerging from the forest comes to the banks of sticks winding slow with sluggish stream through the infernal marsh and the surly ferriman refuses him passage in his boat he has but to draw the golden bow from his bosom and hold it up and straightway the blasterer quails at the site and meekly receives the hero into his crazy bark which sinks deep in the water the unusual weight of the living man even in recent times as we have seen mistletoe has been deemed a protection against witches and trolls and the ancients may well have credited it with the same magical virtue and if the parasite can the sum of our peasants believe open all locks why should it not have served as an open sesame in the hands of Ineas to unlock the gates of death now too we can conjecture why Virbius at Nemi came to be confounded with the sun if Virbius was, as I have tried to show, a tree spirit he must have been the spirit of the oak on which grew the golden bow for tradition represented him as the first of the kings of the wood as an oak spirit he must have been supposed periodically to rekindle the sun's fire and might therefore easily be confounded with the sun itself to explain why Balder, an oak spirit was described as so fair a face and so shining that a light went forth from him and why he should have been so often taken to be the sun and in general we may say that in primitive society when the only known way of making fire is by the friction of wood the savage must necessarily conceive of fire as a property stored away like sap or juice in trees from which he has laboriously to extract it the Senal Indians of California professed to believe that the whole world was once a globe of fire whence that element passed up into the trees and now comes out whenever two pieces of wood are rubbed together similarly the Maidu Indians of California hold that the earth was primarily a globe of molten matter and from that the principle of fire ascended through the roots into the trunk and branches of trees whence the Indians can extract it by means of their drill in Namuluk, one of the Caroline islands they say that the art of making fire was taught men by the gods Olufayet the cunning master of flames gave fire to the bird Mwe and bade him carry it to earth in his bill so the bird flew from tree to tree and stored away the slumbering of the fire in the wood from which men can elicit it by friction in the ancient Vedic hymns of India the fire god Agni is spoken of as born in wood as the embryo of plants or as distributed in plants he is also said to have entered into all plants or to strive after them when he is called the embryo of trees or of trees as well as plants there may be a side glance at the fire produced in forests by the friction of the boughs of trees a tree which has been struck by lightning is naturally regarded by the savage as charged with a double or triple portion of fire for has he not seen the mighty flash enter into the trunk with his own eyes hence perhaps we may explain some of the many superstitious beliefs concerning trees that have been struck by lightning when the Thompson Indians of British Columbia wished to set fire to the houses of their enemies but at them arrows which were either made from a tree that had been struck by lightning or had splinters of such wood attached to them when dish peasants of Saxony refused to burn in their stoves the wood of trees that have been struck by lightning they say that with such fuel the house would be burnt down in light manner the thonga of South Africa were not used such wood as fuel nor warm themselves at a fire which has been kindled with it the tree when lightning sets fire to a tree the winamwanga of northern Rhodesia put out all the fires in the village and plaster the fireplaces afresh while the head men convey the lightning kindled fire to the chief who prays over it the chief then sends out the new fire to all his villages and the villagers reward his messengers for the boom this shows that they look upon fire kindled by lightning with reverence and the reverence is intelligible for they speak of thunder and lightning as God himself coming down to earth similarly the Maidu Indians of California believe that a great man created the world and all its inhabitants and that lightning is nothing but the great man himself descending swiftly out of heaven and rending the trees with his flaming arm it is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient peoples of Europe paid to the oak and the connection which they traced between the oak and their sky god were derived from the much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by lightning than any other tree of our European forests this peculiarity of the tree has seemingly been established by a series of observations instituted within recent years by scientific inquirers who have no mythological theory to maintain however we may explain it whether by the easier passage of electricity through oak wood than through any other timber or in some other way the fact itself may well have attracted the notice of our rude forefathers who dwelt in the vast forests which then covered a large part of Europe and they might naturally account for it in their simple religious way by supposing that the great sky god whom they worshipped and whose awful voice they heard in the role of thunder loved the oak above all the trees of the wood and often descended into it from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning leaving a token of his presence or of his passage in the ribbon and blackened trunk and the blasted foliage such trees would thenceforth be encircled by a nimbus of glory as the visible seats of the thundering sky god certain it is that like some savages both Greeks and Romans identified their great god of the sky and of the oak with the lightning flash which struck the ground and they regularly enclosed such a stricken spot and treated it thereafter as sacred it is not rash to suppose that the ancestors of the Celts and Germans in the forests of central Europe paid a like respect for like reasons to a blasted oak this explanation of the Aryan reverence for the oak and of the association of the tree with the great god of the thunder and the sky was suggested or implied long ago by Jacob Grimm and has been in recent years powerfully reinforced by Mr. W. Ward Fowler it appears to be simpler and more probable than the explanation which I formally adopted, namely that the oak was worshipped primarily for the many benefits which our rude forefathers derived from the tree particularly for the fire which they drew by friction from its wood and that the connection of the oak with the sky was an afterthought based on the belief that the flash of lightning was nothing but the spark which the sky got up aloft elicited by rubbing two pieces of oak wood against each other just as his savage worshipper kindled fire in the forest on earth on that theory the god of the thunder and the sky was derived from the original god of the oak on the present theory which I now prefer the god of the sky and thunder was the great original deity of our Aryan ancestors and his association with the oak was merely an inference based on the frequency with which the oak was seen to be struck by lightning if the Aryans as some think roamed the wide steps of Russia or Central Asia with their flocks and herds before they plunged into the gloom of the European forests they may have worshipped the god of the blue or cloudy firmament and the flashing thunderbolt long before they thought of associating him with the blasted oaks in their new home perhaps the new theory has the further advantage of throwing light on the special sanctity ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an oak the mere rarity of such a growth on an oak hardly suffices to explain the extent and the persistence of the superstition a hint of its real origin is possibly furnished by the statement of Pliny that the Druids worship the plant because they believed it to have fallen from heaven and to be a token that the tree was chosen by the god himself can they have thought that the mistletoe dropped on the oak in a flash of lightning the conjecture is confirmed by the name thunderbasm which is applied to mistletoe in the Swiss canton of Argyll for the epithet clearly implies a close connection between the parasite and the thunder indeed thunderbasm is a popular name in Germany for any bushy nest like excrescence growing on a branch because such a parasitic growth is actually believed by the ignorant to be a product of lightning if there is any truth in this conjecture the real reason why the Druids worshipped a mistletoe bearing oak above all other trees of the forest was a belief that every such oak had not only been struck by lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the celestial fire so that in cutting the mistletoe with mystic rites they were securing for themselves the magical properties of a thunderbolt if that was so we must apparently conclude that the mistletoe was deemed an emanation of the lightning rather than as I have thus far argued of the Midsummer sun perhaps indeed we might combine the two seemingly divergent views by supposing that in the old Arian creed the mistletoe descended from the sun on Midsummer day in a flash of lightning but such a combination is artificial and unsupported so far as I know by any positive evidence whether on mythic or principles the two interpretations can really be reconciled with each other or not I will not presume to say but even should they prove to be discrepant the inconsistency need not have prevented our rude forefathers from embracing both of them at the same time with an equal fervour of conviction for like the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hide bound by the trammels of a pedantic logic in attempting to track his devious thought through the jungle of crash ignorance and blind fear we must always remember that we are treading enchanted ground and must beware of taking for solid realities the cloudy shapes that cross our path or hover and jibber at us through the gloom we can never completely replace ourselves at the standpoint of primitive man see things with his eyes and feel our hearts beat with the emotions that stirred his all our theories concerning him and his ways must therefore fall far short of certainty the utmost we can aspire to in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability to conclude these inquiries we may say that if Balder was indeed as I have conjectured a personification of a mistletoe bearing oak his death by a blow of the mistletoe might on the new theory be explained as a death by a stroke of lightning so long as the mistletoe in which the flame of the lightning smoldered was suffered to remain among the boughs so long no harm could befall the good and kindly god of the oak who kept his life stowed away for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite but when once that seat of his life or of his death was torn from the branch and hurled at the trunk the tree fell the god died smitten by a thunderbolt and what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of Scandinavia may perhaps with all due diffidence in a question so obscure and uncertain be applied to the priest of Diana the king of the wood at Herichia in the oak forests of Italy he may have personated in flesh and blood the great Italian god of the sky Jupiter and heaven in the lightning flash to dwell among men in the mistletoe the thunderbasm the golden bow growing on the sacred oak in the dels of Namie if that were so we need not wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bow which contained the god's life and his own the goddess whom he served and married was herself, if I am right no other than the queen of heaven the true wife of the sky god loved the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills and sailing overhead on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon looked down with pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished surface of the lake Diana's mirror End of Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Farewell to Namie We are at the end of our inquiry but as often happens in the search after truth if we have answered one question we have raised many more if we have followed one track home we have had to pass by others that opened off it and led or seemed to lead to far other goals than the sacred grove at Namie Some of these paths we have followed a little way others if fortune should be kind the writer and the reader may one day pursue together For the present we have journeyed far enough together and it is time to part Yet before we do so we may well ask ourselves whether there is not some more general conclusion some lesson if possible of hope and encouragement to be drawn from the melancholy record of human error and folly which has engaged our attention in this book If then we consider on the one hand the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times and on the other hand the wide difference between the means he has adopted to satisfy them in different ages which shall perhaps be disposed to conclude that the movement of the higher thought so far as we can trace it has on the whole been from magic through legion to science In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side he believes in a certain established order of nature which he can surely count and which he can manipulate for his own ends when he discovers his mistake when he recognizes sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature whom he now ascribes all those far reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself thus in the acute of minds magic is gradually superseded by religion which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will the passion or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind though vastly superior to him in power but as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be unsatisfactory for it assumes that the succession of natural events is not determined by immutable laws but is to some extent variable and irregular and this assumption is not borne out by closer observation on the contrary the more we scrutinize that succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity the punctual precision with which wherever we can follow them the operations of nature are carried on every great advance in knowledge has extended the sphere of order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of apparent disorder in the world till now we are ready to anticipate that even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to reign a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos to cosmos thus the keen of mind still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate and to revert in measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly what in magic had only been implicitly assumed to wit an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events which if carefully observed enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly in short religion as an explanation of nature is displaced by science but while science has this much in common with magic that both rest on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis of science the difference flows naturally from the different modes on which the two orders have been reached for whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension by false analogy of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds the order laid down by science is derived from patient an exact observation of the phenomena themselves the abundance, the solidity and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence of its method here at last after groping about in the dark for countless ages man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth a golden key that opens many locks in the treasury of nature it is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress moral and intellectual as well as material in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated it is necessarily complete and final we must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or in common parlance the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever shifting phantasmogoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe in the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories of thought and as science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena of registering the shadows on the screen of which we in this generation conform no idea the advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that forever recedes we need not murmur at the endless pursuit great things will come of that pursuit though we may not enjoy them brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future some great Ulysses of the realms of thought than shine on us the dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science but a dark shadow lies a thwart the far end of this fair prospect for however vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may have in store for man he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or moat in the ages to come man may be able to predict perhaps even to control the wayward courses of the winds and clouds but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions like the earth and the sun themselves are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked today she may ban tomorrow they too, like so much that to common eyes seem solid may melt into air into thin air without dipping so far into the future we may illustrate the course which thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of three different threads the black thread of magic the red thread of religion and the white thread of science if under science we may include those simple truths drawn from observation of nature of which men in all ages have possessed a store could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning we should probably perceive it to be at first a checker of black and white a patchwork of true and false notions hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion but carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that while the black and white checker still runs through it there rests on the middle portion of the web where religion has entered most deeply into its texture a dark crimson stain which shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as the white thread of science is woven more and more into the tissue to a web thus checkered and stained thus shocked with threads of diverse hues but gradually changing colour the farther it is unrolled the state of modern thought with all its divergent aims and conflicting tendencies may be compared will the great movement which for centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of thought be continued in the near future or will a reaction set in which may arrest progress and even undo much that has been done to keep up our parable what will be the colour of the web which the fates are now weaving on the humming loom of time will it be white or red we cannot tell a faint glimmering light a liquid portion of the web clouds and thick darkness hide the other end our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her weary sails in port at last once more we take the road to Neime it is evening and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the Alban Hills we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset its golden glory at the aural of a dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter's the sight once seen can never be forgotten but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountainside till we come to Neime and look down on the lake in its deep hollow now fast disappearing in the evening shadows the place has changed but little since Diana received the homage and the sacred grove the temple of the Sylvan goddess indeed has vanished and the king of the wood no longer stands sentinel over the golden bow but Neime's woods are still green and as the sunset fades above them in the west there comes to us born on the swell of the wind the sound of the church bells of Rome ringing the Angelus Ave Maria sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant city die lingeringly away across the wide companion marches Le Roy More Vive Loire Ave Maria and of the Golden Bow