fearfully fine. Caliban, and Sycorax, and
Setebos might well be imagined to have
first glared into life through the long-fermenting
incantation of 'accustomed monstrous
thunder.'"

The serpent Python, slain by Apollo, was
said to have been evolved by heat from the
mud and moisture left by the Deucalion
deluge. He was the stupendous offspring of a
terrible solar chemistry. Ovid, in the First
Book of the Metamorphoses, speaking of the
creation of this serpent, as well as of all
brute animals, after the celebrated Greek
flood, says:

All other creatures took their numerous birth
And figures from the voluntary earth.
When that old humour with the sun did sweat,
And slimy marishes grew hig with heat, --
The pregnant seeds, as from their mother's womb,
From quickening Earth both growth and form assume.
So, when seven-channell'd Nile forsakes the plain,
When ancient bounds retiring streams contain,
And late-left slime ethereal fervours burn,
Men various creatures with the glebe upturn:
Of those, some in their very time of birth;
Some lame; and others half alive, half earth.
For Heat and Moisture, when they temperate grow,
Forthwith conceive, and life on things bestow.
From striving Fire and Water all proceed,
Discording concord ever apt to breed.
So, Earth, by that late deluge muddy grown,
When on her lap reflecting Titan shone,
Produced a world of forms, restored the late,
And other unknown monsters did create.

We quote from the old muscular translation
(sixteen hundred and thirty-two) by George
Sandys, who, in his singular annotations,
observes: "Heat and Moisture, the parents
of Generation, are feigned here to have produced
Python. . . . But the sense of this
fable is merely physical; for Python, born
after the Deluge, of the humid earth, is that
great exhalation which rose from the late
drowned world, until it was dissipated by the
fervour of the sun, or Apollo. The word
[Python] signifies putrefaction: and because
the sun consumes the putrefaction of the
earth, his beams darting from his orb like
arrows,—with his arrows he is said to have
killed Python. So, serpentine Error by the
light of Truth is confounded."

Milton, in Paradise Lost, speaks of this
serpent as him

Whom the sun
Ingender'd in the Pythian vale on slime,
Huge Python.

Shakspeare probably had the idea of solar
creation in his mind when he made Timon of
Athens (act iv., scene iii.) exclaim, addressing
the earth,—

Teem with new monsters, whom thy upward face
Hath to the marbled mansion all above
Never presented!

And, a few lines before this, the misanthrope
speaks of—

All the abhorred births below crisp Heaven,
Whereon Hyperion's quickening fire doth shine.

The fructifying power of the Nile, mentioned
by Ovid in the foregoing quotation
from the Metamorphoses (it is thought, by
the way, that the belief in the spontaneous
creation of animals, arose in Egypt) has been
a favourite idea of the poets. It is thus
alluded to by Spenser in the Faery Queene
(Book I., c. i.):—

As when old Father Nilus 'gins to swell
With timely pride above the Egyptian vale,
His fattie waves doe fertile slime outwell,
And overflow each plaine and lowly dale;
But when his later spring 'gins to avale,
Huge heaps of mud he leaves, wherein there breed
Ten thousand kinds of creatures, partly male
And partly female, of his fruitfull seed:
Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man
reed.

And again, in Book III. c. vi., where the
poet writes with all the zeal of a fire-worshipper:

—Reason teacheth that the fruitfull seades
Of all things living, through impression
Of the sun-beames in moyst complexion,
Doe life conceive, and quickned are by kynd:
So, after Nilus' inundation,
Infinite shapes of creatures men doe fynd
Informèd in the mud on which the sunne hath shynd.

Great Father he of Generation
Is rightly cald,—th' Author of life and light;
And his faire sister, for creation,
Ministreth matter fitt, which, tempred right
With heate and humour, breedes the living wight.

After all, may not the matter of fact be
correct, even though the deduction be erroneous?
We know that in hot countries it is
very common for oviparous animals to leave
their eggs in mud or sand, where they are in
time hatched by the warmth of the heavens.
Your sun is a great incubator. We have read
accounts of the Nile sands being at certain
seasons alive with the upheaving of the newly
born crocodiles, as they come shouldering
their way into the sultry air and light.

It was long before the belief of which we
write was given up, even by the scientific.
Bacon, who, notwithstanding his sturdiness
in repudiating much of the lumber of the
schools, had ever a backward eye to the traditions
of antiquity, held firmly to the opinion
that many living creatures are produced
solely from putrefaction. In his Natural
History (Century VII. Experiments 696,
697, 698), he discourses at large upon this
subject. He classes earthworms, eels, snakes,
wood-worms, fleas, moths, grasshoppers, silk-
worms, flies, bees, and some others, under the
head of imperfect and anomalously produced
creatures. And he mentions the sudden birth
of a kind of fly by intense heat; a story which
has apparently derived startling confirmation
within the last few years from the accidental
discovery of Mr. Crosse, of Bristol. "It is
affirmed," says Bacon, "both by ancient and
modern observation, that in furnaces of
copper and brass, where chalcites (which is
vitriol) is often cast in to mend the working,