g of the western tribes, not always by bodily presence, but by the actio in distans of politics. And the birth of Herodotus was precisely in the seventy first year from that period. It is the greatest of periods that is concerned. And we also as willingly, we repeat, would offer our contingent. What we propose to do, is to bring forward two or three important suggestions of others not yet popularly known-shaping and pointing, if possible, their application-brightening their justice, or strengthening their outlines. And with these we propose to intermingle one or two suggestions, more exclusively our

own.

I.-The Non-Planetary Earth of Herodotus in its relation to the Planetary Sun.

Mr Hermann Bobrik is the first torchbearer to Herodotus who has

thrown a strong light on his theory of the earth's relation to the solar system. This is one of the præcognita, literally indispensable to the comprehension of the geographical basis assumed by Herodotus. And it is really interesting to see how one original error had drawn after it a train of others-how one restoration of light has now illuminated a whole hemisphere of objects. We suppose it the very next thing to a fatal impossibility, that any man should at once rid his mind so profoundly of all natural biases from education, or almost from human instinct, as barely to suspect the physical theory of Herodotus-barely to imagine the idea of a divorce occurring in any theory between the solar orb and the great phenomena of summer and winter. Prejudications, having the force of a necessity, had blinded generation after generation of students to the very admission in limine of such a theory as could go the length of dethroning the sun himself from all influence over the great vicissitudes of heat and cold -seed-time and harvest-for man. They did not see what actually was, what lay broadly below their eyes, in Herodotus, because it seemed too fantastic a dream to suppose that it could be.

The case is far more common than feeble psychologists imagine. Numerous are the instances in which we actually see-not that which is really there to be seen-but that hich we believe à priori ought to be

there. And in cases so palpable as that of an external sense, it is not dif ficult to set the student on his guard. But in cases more intellectual or moral, like several in Herodotus, it is difficult for the teacher himself to be effectually vigilant. It was not any thing actually seen by Herodotus which led him into denying the solar functions; it was his own independent speculation. This suggested to him a plausible hypothesis; plausible it was for that age of the world; and afterwards, on applying it to the actual difficulties of the case, this hypothesis seemed so far good, that it did really unlock them. The case stood thus:- Herodotus contemplated Cold not as a mere privation of Heat, but as a positive quality; quite as much entitled to 66 high consideration," in the language of ambassadors, as its rival heat; and quite as much to a "retiring pension," in case of being superannuated. Thus we all know, from Addison's fine raillery, that a certain philosopher regarded darkness not at all as any result from the absence of light, but fancied that, as some heavenly bodies are luminaries, so others (which he called tenebrific stars) might have the office of "raying out positive darkness." In the infancy of science, the idea is natural to the human mind; and we remember hearing a great man of our own times declare, that no sense of conscious power had ever so vividly dilated his mind, nothing so like a revelation, as when one day in broad sunshine, whilst yet a child, he discovered that his own shadow, which he had often angrily hunted, was no real existence, but a mere hindering of the sun's light from filling up the space screened by his own body. The old grudge, which he cherished against this coy fugitive shadow, melted away in the rapture of this great discovery. To him the discovery had doubtless been originally half-suggested by explanations of his elders imperfectly comprehended. But in itself the distinction between the affirmative and the negative is a step perhaps the most costly in effort of any that the human mind is summoned to take; and the greatest indulgence is due to those early stages of civilization when this step had not been taken. Herodotus, there existed two great counter-forces in absolute hostilityheat and cold; and these forces were

For

incarnated in the WINDS. It was the north and north-east wind, not any distance of the sun, which radiated cold and frost; it was the southern wind from Ethiopia, not at all the sun, which radiated heat. But could a man so sagacious as Herodotus stand with his ample Grecian forehead exposed to the noonday sun, and suspect no part of the calorific agency to be seated in the sun? Certainly he could not. But this partial agency is no more than what we of this day allow to secondary or tertiary causes apart from the principal. We, that regard the sun as upon the whole our planetary fountain of light, yet recog. nise an electrical aurora, a zodiacal light, &c., as substitutes not palpably dependent. We, that regard the sun as upon the whole our fountain of heat, yet recognise many co-operative, many modifying forces having the same office-such as the local configuration of ground-such as sea neighbourhoods or land neighbourhoods, marshes or none, forests or none, strata of soil fitted to retain heat and fund it, or to disperse it and cool it. Precisely in the same way Herodotus did allow an agency to the sun upon the daily range of heat, though he allowed none to the same luminary in regu lating the annual range. What caused the spring and autumn, the summer and winter, (though generally in those ages there were but two seasons recognised,) was the action of the winds. The diurnal arch of heat (as we may call it) ascending from sunrise to some hour, (say two p. m.,) when the sum of the two heats (the funded annual heat and the fresh increments of daily heat) reaches its maximum, and the descending limb of the same arch from this hour to sunset-this he explained entirely out of the sun's daily revolution, which to him was, of course, no apparent motion, but a real one in the sun. It is truly amusing to hear the great man's infantine simplicity in describing the effects of this solar journey. The sun rises, it seems, in India; and these poor Indians, roasted by whole nations at breakfast-time, are then up to their chius in water, whilst we thankless Westerns are taking "tea and toast" at our ease. However, it is a long lane which has no turning; and by noon the sun has driven so many stages away from India, that the poor creatures begin to come out of their

rivers, and really find things tolerably con fortable. India is now cooled down to a balmy Grecian temperature."All right behind!" as the mail coach guards observe; but not quite right a-head, where the sun is racing away over the boiling brains of the Ethiopians, Lybians, &c., and driving Jupiter- Ammon perfectly distracted with his furnace. But, when things are at the worst, the proverb assures us that they will mend. And for an early five o'clock dinner, Ethiopia finds that she has no great reason to complain. All civilized people are now cool and happy for the rest of the day. But, as to the woolly-headed rascals on the west coast of Africa, they "catch it" towards sunset, and "no mistake." Yet why trouble our heads about inconsiderable black fellows like them, who have been cool all day whilst better men were melting away by pailfuls? And such is the history of a summer's day in the heavens above and on the earth beneath. As to little Greece, she is but skirted by the sun, who keeps away far to the south; thus she is maintained in a charming state of equilibrium by her fortunate position on the very frontier line of the fierce Boreas and the too voluptuous Notos.

Meantime one effect follows from this transfer of the solar functions to the winds, which has not been remarked,

viz. that Herodotus has a double north; one governed by the old noisy Boreas, another by the silent constellation Arktos. And the consequence of this fluctuating north, as might be guessed, is the want of any true north at all; for the two points of the wind and the constellation do not coincide in the first place; and secondly, the wind does not coincide with itself, but naturally traverses through a few points right and left. Next, the east also will be indeterminate from a different cause. Had Herodotus lived in a high northern latitude, there is no doubt that the ample range of difference between the northerly points of rising in the summer and the southerly in winter, would have forced his attention upon the fact, that only at the equinox, vernal or autumnal, does the sun's rising accurately coincide with the east. But in his Ionian climate, the deflexions either way, to the north or to the south, were too inconsiderable to force themselves upon the eye; and thus a more indeterminate east

settlements were rare, was notorious to all the world as the flourishing emporium, on the south shore of the Black Sea, of a civilized people, literally hustled by barbarians. Consequently-and this is a point to which all commentators alike are blind-the Danube descends upon the Euxine in a long line running due south. Else, we demand, how could it antistrophise with the Nile? Else, we demand, how could it lie right over against Sinope? Else, we demand, how could it make that right-angled bend to the west in the earlier section of its course, which is presupposed in its perfect analogy to the Nile of Herodotus? If already it were lying east and west in that lower part of its course which approaches the Euxine, what occasion could it offer for a right-angled turn, or for any turn at all-what possibility for any angle whatever between this lower reach and that superior reach so confessedly running eastwards according to all accounts of its derivation? For as respects the Nile, by way of close to this article, it remains to in form the reader-that Herodotus had evidently met in Upper Egypt slaves or captives in war from the regions of Soudan, Tombuctoo, &c. This is the opinion of Rennell, of Browne the visiter of the Ammonian Oasis, and many other principal authorities; and for a reason which we always regard with more respect, though it were the weakest of reasons, than all the authorities of this world clubbed together. And this reason was the coincidence of what Herodotus reports, with the truth of facts first ascertained thou sands of years later. These slaves, or some people from those quarters, had told him of a vast river lying east and west, of course the Niger, but (as he and they supposed) a superior section of the Nile; and therefore, by geometrical necessity, falling at right angles upon that other section of the Nile so familiar to himself lying south and north. Hence arose a faith that is not primarily hence, but hence in combination with a previous construction existing in his mind for the geometry of the Danube, that the two rivers Danube and Nile had a mystic relation as arctic and antarctic powers over man. Herodotus had been taught to figure the Danube as a stream of two main inclinations-an upper section rising in the extreme west of Europe, (possibly in Charlotte

Square, Edinburgh,) whence he traveled with the arrow's flight due east in search of his wife the Euxine; but somewhere in the middle of his course, hearing that her dwelling lay far to the south, and having then completed his distance in longitude, afterwards he ran down his latitude with the headlong precipitation of a lover, and surprised the bride due north from Sinope. This construction it was of the Danube's course which subsequently, upon his hearing of a corresponding western limb for the Nile, led him to perceive the completion of that analogy between the two rivers, its absolute perfection, which already he had partially suspected. Their very figurations now appeared to reflect and repeat each other in solemn mimicry, as previously he had discovered the mimical correspondence of their functions; for this latter doctrine had been revealed to him by the Egyptian priests, then the chief depositaries of Egyptian learning. They had informed him, and evidently had persuaded him, that already more than once the sun had gone round to the region of Europe; pursuing his diurnal arch as far to the north of Greece as now he did to the south; and carrying in his equipage all the changes of every kind which were required to make Scythia an Egypt, and consequently to make the Istros a Nile. The same annual swelling then filled the channel of the Danube, which at present gladdens the Nile. The same luxuriance of vegetation succeeded as a dowery to the gay summer land of Trans-Euxine and Para-Danubian Europe, which for thousands of years had seemed the peculiar heirloom of Egypt. Old Boreas, we are glad of that, was required to pack up "his alls," and be off; his new business was to plague the black rascals, and to bake them with hoar-frost; which must have caused them to shake their ears in some astonishment for a few centuries, until they got used to it. Whereas "the sweet south wind" of the ancient mariner, leaving Africa, pursued "the mariner's holloa" all over the Euxine and the Palus Mæotis. The Danube, in short, became the Nile; and the same deadly curiosity haunted its fountains. So that many a long-legged Bruce would strike off in those days towards Charlotte Square. But all in vain: “Nec licuit populis”— or, stop, to save the metre

"Nec poteras, Charlotte, populis tum

parva videri."

Nobody would reach the fountains; particularly as there would be another arm, El-Abiad or white river, perhaps at Stockbridge. However, the explorers must have" burned" strongly (as children say at hide-and-seek) when they attained a point so near to the fountains as Blackwood's Magazine, which doubtless was going on pretty well in those days.

We are sorry that Herodotus should have been so vague and uncircumstantial in his account of these vicissitudes; since it is pretty evident to any man who reflects on the case-that, had he pursued the train of changes inevitable to Egypt under the one single revolution affecting the Nile itself as a slime-depositing river, his judicious intellect would soon have descried the

obliteration of the whole Egyptian valley, (elsewhere he himself calls that valley δώρον του Νείλου —a gift of the Nile,) consequently the obliteration of the people, consequently the immemorial extinction of all those records (or, if they were posterior to the last revolution in favour of Egypt, at any rate of the one record) which could have transmitted the memory of such an astonishing transfer. Meantime the reader is now in possession of the whole theory contemplated by Herodotus. It was no mere lusus nature that the one river repeated the other, and as it were mocked the other, in form and

geographical relations. It was no joke that lurked under that mask of resemblance. Each was the other alternately. It was the case of Castor and Pollux, one brother rising as the other set. The Danube could always comfort himself with the idea-that he was the Nile "elect; " the other, or provisional Nile, only "continu'ng to hold the seals until his successor should be installed in office." The Nile, in fact, appears to have the best of it in our time; but then there is "a braw time coming," and, after all, swelling as he is with annual conceit, father Nile, in Parliamentary phrase, is but "the warming-pan" for the Danube; keeping the office warm for him. A new administration is form. ed, and out he goes bag and baggage. It is less important, however, for us, though far more so for the two rivers, to speculate on the reversion of their final prospects, than upon the present symbols of this reversion

That is,

in the unity of their forms. it less concerns us to deduce the harmony of their functions from the harmony of their geographical courses, than to abide by the inverse argument-that, where the former harmony was so loudly inferred from the latter, at any rate, that fact will de

monstrate the existence of the latter

harmony in the judgment and faith of Herodotus. He could not possibly have insisted on the analogy between the two channels geographically, as good in logic for authenticating a secret and prophetic analogy between their alternating offices, but that at least he must firmly have believed in the first of these analogies-as already existing and open to the verification of the human eye. The second or ulterior analogy might be false, and yet affect only its own separate credit, whilst the falsehood of the first was ruinous to the credit of both. Whence it is evident, that, of the two resemblances in form and function, tne resemblance in form was the least disputable of the two for Herodotus.

This argument, and the others which we have indicated, and amongst those others, above all, the position of the Danube's mouths right over against a city situated as was Sinope, (i. e. not doubtfully emerging from either flank of the Euxine, west or east, but broadly and almost centrally planted on the southern basis of that sea,) we offer, as a body of demonstrative proof, that, to the mature faith of Herodotus, the Danube or Istros ran north and south in its Euxine section, and that its right-angled section ran west and east-a very important element towards the true Europe of Herodotus, which (as we contend) has not yet been justly conceived or figured by his geographical commen