of a single man, not flushed with victory, but reappearing after disasters, is, to the full, as astonishing as that the character of the war with the Volscians should be entirely changed by the transference of Coriolanus from the one side to the other. There is nothing in the whole series of the Roman wars, as related to us, which is so marvellous as the suppression of the Indian mutiny.— One can imagine how a critic could point out the exceeding improbability of a mere handful of men, scattered over a vast empire, recovering their ascendency amidst a hostile population, and against overwhelming numbers as well armed and disciplined as themselves, and reducing the stronghold of the rebellion before any reinforcements could reach them from without; and how utterly impossible it would appear that this should mainly be effected through the loyalty of the Sikhs, who, a few years before, were our most determined enemies, and who had only just been pacified after a dangerous revolt. We find even minor incidents which are held to stamp a fabulous character upon the ancient narratives, curiously reproduced in modern days. The throwing of loaves of bread into the enemy's camp from the besieged capitol, has its parallel in the siege of Haarlem, where the same thing was done,-not with a view of deceiving the enemy into a belief that plenty reigned within, but in the bitter mockery of despair at the exhaustion of all their resources. So also the feat of Horatius Cocles, whom Niebuhr regards as only a symbolical representatives of one of the tribes in a poem, is almost exactly repeated in the same Dutch wars. John Haring, of Horn, alone held a narrow part of the dyke, between the Diemer Lake and the Y, against the whole Spanish force, until his compatriots had effected their retreat over the gap, and then, like Cocles, he plunged into the water and escaped uninjured. Even the supernatural appearance of the Dioscuroi at the battle of Lake Regillus does not prove that battle to be, as Niebuhr maintains, a poetical invention, for something similar has been reported of several battles in purely historic times. Even as late as the sixteenth century, St. James, of Compostella, mounted on a white horse, appeared at the head of the Spanish forces at the battle of

Otumba, and led them on to victory. I say that he appeared, because we have the undoubted authority for it of Bernal Diaz, who was in the battle himself. It is true that Diaz says that it did not appear to him to be St. James, but rather one Francisco da Morla, with whom he was well acquainted; but then he adds, that it probably was St. James himself after all, only that he, miserable sinner that he was, was not thought worthy to recognize the saintly presence. We may probably put more faith in Diaz's first impres sion than in his subsequent conviction, but it would never enter into our thoughts to doubt the reality of the battle, on account of the reported supernatural incident.

For these and similar reasons, I am inclined to the belief that the general credibility of early Roman history has been considerably underrated; but with the utmost latitude of evidence which can be permitted, it must still be acknowledged that there is very little of it indeed, upon which we can look with any certain confidence in the accuracy of the details. If we merely preserved that which we could shew to rest upon a satisfactory basis of proof, we should have nothing left but a nerveless and lifeless skeleton of no practical utility, and of no æsthetic value. Even with regard to the capture of Rome by the Gauls, the first event for which we have any contemporary evidence at all, all of proved fact that Sir Cornewall Lewis has been able to extract may be briefly summed up thus,--That on the 16th of July, in some year between the three hundred and eighty-seventh and three hundred and ninetieth before Christ, a battle was fought and lost about ten miles from Rome on the Allia, a stream which no subsequent topographer has been able to identify; that the city was captured and the capitol besieged; that the geese did give the alarm on the occasion of a midnight assault; and that the Vestal virgins, whilst making their escape over the Sublician bridge, were picked up in the wagon of a man named Albinius (22).

If, on the other hand, we follow the German critics, and endeavor to re-construct a perfect history, we involve ourselves in an ocean of doubt and uncertainty. With such a maxim as that laid

(22) Lewis. Cred. Rom. Hist., II., p. 355.

down by Niebuhr, "that the inversion of a story into its opposite is a characteristic of legendary history;" (23) so that a statement directly militating against a hypothesis, may become a testimony in its favor; with ætiological legends which may be made at will to prove or disprove an event, and with an etymological alchemy which can recognise in "Danai" only another form of "Latini" (24), it is evident that anything can be destroyed, or anything established. Whatever be the learning expended in the investigation, the whole system resolves itself into conjecture; and as no two men will take the same view, we have as many histories as we have historians. There is no firm point upon which you can take your stand; all around you is shifting, unstable, and uncertainlike a feverish dream in which everything, as you try to grasp it, suddenly becomes something else-or like the mirage of the desert, which, from every different point of view, assumes an altered aspect.

We can neither accept nor reject everything in these early tales but whether it be attempted to decide ex cathedra what is true and what is untrue, or whether it be sought to reconstruct from the disjecta membra a new version of events, I would fall back upon Niebuhr's dictum in one of his soberer moments, and acknowledge it as the only safe principle which can govern us: "If any pretend that he is able to decide in questions of such obscurity, let none listen to him." We must take the legends as they stand, with all their faults and with all their beauties. We may call attention to their inconsistencies, but we cannot reconcile them; we may point out their improbabilities, but we cannot separate the true from the false. But amidst all this doubt one thing is certain-that, whether true or untrue, they were believed in by great nations of antiquity, and they thus form an integral portion of the better authenticated history of the race. We can no more arrive at a true conception of a Greek or Roman of historic times, without the knowledge of their earlier

(23) Hist. I., p. 40.

(24) Lect. Ant. Hist. I., p. 249 (lect. xxii.).

E

legends, than we can imagine an ear of wheat without the grain from which it sprung. If all the heroes and all their exploits were fictitious, the very formation of the fiction had its origin in a state of society, in a tone of thought, and in a moral and intellectual condition, of which it is itself the best exponent. The legends may not contain a veritable history of events, but they are an important contribution to a true history of the human mind. They are even more, for the firm belief in them reacted upon the national character, and through the Greeks and Romans this influence has extended down to us, and will leave its impress upon the literature, the thoughts and the actions of the latest posterity.

I cannot close these remarks more appropriately than in the words of Grote, the safest and most philosophical of our historians. They apply more particularly to the mythological periods of Grecian history, but they embody the only useful method of treating the first dawn of the history of any nation. "I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks, and known only through their legends, without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,-if he asks me why I do not withdraw the curtain and disclose the picture,-I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him on exhibiting his masterpiece of imitative art: The curtain is the picture.' What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish in their past time : the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot by any ingenuity be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands,-not to efface, still less to repaint it." (25).

(25) Pref. p. vb.

PAPER II.-GOLD FIELDS OF NOVA SCOTIA.

BY DR. ANDERSON.

[Read before the Society, 4th November, 1863.]

IN the Illustrated News of 9th March, 1850, will be found the report of an address delivered by Sir Robert Murchison before the Royal Institution. It is there stated that Sir Roderick gave as an axiom, that gold ore never occurs in any great quantity except under certain conditions of "constants," viz.: when the ancient stratified rocks, constituting the backbones of continents, or great islands, have been penetrated, and altered, and crystalized by the intrusion of igneous or eruptive matter. In the course of his address Sir Roderick repeatedly dwelt on the fact that the auriferous veins invariably deteriorated in the per centage of gold to the weight of quartz, the deeper they were traced. That all the rich portions are found at or near the surface; hence the powerful attrition which the surface has undergone in ancient times had disintegrated the greater quantity, and distributed the freed gold in heaps of gravel and sand over plateaus or in valleys. He shewed that mining in the Ural Mountains and in Mexico proved that gold decreased according to depth, when it finally ceased and was replaced by silver.

Sir Roderick further remarked, that Job was a true and good geologist, when he said, "There is a mine for the silver, and the earth hath dust of gold." That it would be in vain to assign any limits to the productive value of silver mines, when science had been fully applied to them, for they increase in value as in depth, whereas gold diminishes as we descend to seek it.

Sir Roderick inveighed strongly against the popular delusion, that the Californian gold regions, then recently discovered, would be all equally productive, basing his opinion on the presumption that there could be no variation from the constants, which he appeared to view as a law of nature.