The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)

757

Pliny, Natur. Hist. xvi. 249.

758

See above, p. 85 (#x_6_i23).

759

J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,

i. 153. See above, p. 85 (#x_6_i23).

760

This interpretation of Balder's death was anticipated by W. Schwartz (Der Ursprung der Mythologie, Berlin, 1860, p. 176), who cut the whole knot by dubbing Balder “the German thunder-and-lightning god” and mistletoe “the wonderful thunder-and-lightning flower.” But as this learned writer nursed a fatal passion for thunder and lightning, which he detected lurking in the most unlikely places, we need not wonder that he occasionally found it in places where there were some slight grounds for thinking that it really existed.

761

On the relation of the priest to Jupiter, and the equivalence of Jupiter and Juno to Janus (Dianus) and Diana, see The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, ii. 376 sqq.

762

“I quite agree how humiliating the slow progress of man is, but every one has his own pet horror, and this slow progress or even personal annihilation sinks in my mind into insignificance compared with the idea or rather I presume certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of the progress of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi, with a vengeance” (More Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, London, 1903, i. 260 sq.).

763

Since this passage was written the hope which it expresses has been to some extent strengthened by the discovery of radium, which appears to prolong indefinitely the prospect of the duration of the sun's heat, and with it the duration of life on its attendant planets. See (Sir) George Howard Darwin's Presidential Address to the British Association, Report of the 75th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (South Africa, 1905), pp. 28 sq.; F. Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium, Third Edition (London, 1912), pp. 240 sqq.; E. Rutherford, Radio-active Substances and their Radiations (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 653-656. At the same time it should be borne in mind that even if the atomic disintegration and accompanying liberation of energy, which characterize radium and kindred elements, should prove to be common in different degrees to all the other elements and to form a vast and till lately unsuspected store of heat to the sun, this enormous reserve of fuel would only defer but could not avert that final catastrophe with which the solar system and indeed the whole universe is remorselessly threatened by the law of the dissipation of energy.

764

See above, vol. i. pp. 15 sq.

765

Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, Hymns and Incantations with Illustrative Notes on Words, Rites, and Customs, dying and obsolete: orally collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and translated into English (Edinburgh, 1900), ii. 312.

766

Above, vol. i. pp. 315 sqq.

767

The late Rev. P. Dehon, S.J., “Religion and Customs of the Uraons,” Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. i. No. 9 (Calcutta, 1906), p. 141.

768

“Every clan (Familienstamm) has a definite thing which is forbidden to all the members of the clan, whether it be a particular kind of meat, or a certain fish, or as here the stalk of a gourd.”

769

“The place in Nguu, where the ghost is said to dwell.”

770

“In Ukami.”

771

C. Velten, Schilderungen der Suaheli (Göttingen, 1901), pp. 195-197.

772

Miss Alice Werner, The Natives of British Central Africa (London, 1906), p. 82. In a letter Miss Werner tells me that she learned these particulars at Blantyre in 1893, and that the chief lived in the neighbourhood of Mlanje.

773

Rev. Henry Rowley, Twenty Years in Central Africa (London, N.D.), pp. 36 sqq. For a reference to this and all the other works cited in this Note I am indebted to the kindness of Miss Alice Werner.

774

Rev. David Clement Scott, A Cyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang'anja Language spoken in British Central Africa (Edinburgh, 1892), p. 315.

775

Edward Steere, Swahili Tales (London, 1870), pp. 441-453. The young man in the story is spoken of now as the nephew and now as the son of the man he murdered. Probably he was what we should call a nephew or brother's son of his victim; for under the classificatory system of relationship, which seems to prevail among the Bantu stock, to whom the Swahili belong, a man regularly calls his paternal uncle his father.

776

Above, vol. i. pp. 104 sq.

777

Virgil, Aen. vi. 205 sqq.: —

“Quale solet silvis brumali frigore viscum
Fronde virere nova, quod non sua seminat arbos,
Et croceo fetu teretis circumdare truncos:
Talis erat species auri frondentis opacaIlice,
sic leni crepitabat bractea vento.”

778

W. Schlich, Manual of Forestry, vol. iv. Forest Protection, by W. R. Fisher, M.A., Second Edition (London, 1907), p. 412. French peasants about Coulommiers think that mistletoe springs from birds' dung. See H. Gaidoz, “Bulletin critique de la Mythologie Gauloise,” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, ii. (1880) p. 76. The ancients were well aware that mistletoe is propagated from tree to tree by seeds which have been voided by birds. See Theophrastus, De Causis Plantarum, ii. 17. 5; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, xvi. 247. Pliny tells us that the birds which most commonly deposited the seeds were pigeons and thrushes. Can this have been the reason why Virgil (Aen. vi. 190 sqq.) represents Aeneas led to the Golden Bough by a pair of doves?

779

James Sowerby, English Botany, xxi. (London, 1805) p. 1470.