Pioneers of evolution from Thales to Huxley : with an intermediate chapter on the causes of arrest of the movement.

  • Edward Clodd
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pioneers of evolution from Thales to Huxley : with an intermediate chapter on the causes of arrest of the movement. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    - affairs, do not you see here by this 3 number of pictures how many people, ^ for the sake of their vows, have been , saved in storms at sea, and got into \ harbour ? Yes, answered Diagoras, ' I see how it is; for those are never J painted who happen to be drowned. ^ There is nothing new under the sun. Horace {Odes, bk. i., v.) tells of the \ shipwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thank-offering in the temple ' of the sea-god who had preserved him; . Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the , early part of the sixteenth century—that ^ is, some 1,500 years after Horace— f, describes the classic custom of ex voto ^ offerings at length; while Pennant the J antiquary, describing the well of Saint , Winifred in Flintshire in the last cen- ^ tury, tells of the votive offermgs, m the shape of crutches and other objects, ^ which were hung about it. To this day ^ the store is receiving additions. The ^ sick crowd thither as of old they crowded g into the temples of ^sculapius and Serapis; mothers bring their sick children , as in Imperial Rome they took them to ' the Temple of Romulus and Remus. ^ A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a plunge in the bath itself, ^ is followed by prayers at the altar of the chapel which encloses the well. When ' the saint's feast-day is held, the afflicted !; gather to kiss the reliquary that holds ] iher bones. Perhaps one of the most ' : pathetic sights in CathoHc churches, especially in out-of-the-way villages, is ■ the altars on which are hung votive offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the vworshipper has been delivered. ^' As to the images, tricked-out in curious \ -robes and gewgaws, Middleton could not help recollecting the picture which ;^ old Homer draws of Q. Heaiba of Troy, ' prostrating herself before the miraculous \ Jmage of Pa/las, while his wonder at • the Loretto image of the Queen of ■ Heaven with «a face as black as a > ^Negus reminds him of the reference in ^'1 Baruch to the idols black with the per- ' petualsmoak of lamps and incense. Inhis Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys Davids refers to churches dedicated to Notre Dame in virtue of legends concerning the discovery of images of the Virgin on the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the soil. Such a black Madonna was found near Grenoble, in the commune of La Zouche. Then, in the titles of the new deities, Middleton correctly sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the great mother of Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis, there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing examples of myths and misreadings through which certain saints have a place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the title of Saint Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone (Praefectu-S.), Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S. Veronica secured canonisation through a blunder over the words Vera Icon : still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a mantel ! The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition of some saint or angel, call to mind the impression of Hercules' feet on a stone in Scythia the picture of the Virgin, which came from heaven, suggests the descent of Numa's shield from the clouds that of the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the lique- faction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that the frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of fire {Sat. v. 97-100). Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on these
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