The Emperor Akbar personally directing the tying up of a wild Elephant. Tempera painting by Abu’l Fazl. (1597-98.) Photographed for this work from the original in the India Museum ....

AT the Congress held at Oxford in September, 1908, those who heard Count Goblet d’Alviella’s address on the “Method and Scope of the History of Religions” must have felt the thrill which announces the stirring of new ideas, when, in a memorable passage, the speaker asked “whether the psychology of animals has not equally some relation to the science of religions?” At any rate, these words came to me as a confirmation of the belief that the study which has engaged my attention for several years,

IN one of these enigmatic sayings which launch the mind on boundless seas, Cardinal Newman remarked that we know less of animals than of angels. A large part of the human race explains the mystery by what is called transmigration, metempsychosis, Samsara , Seelenwanderung ; the last a word so compact and picturesque that it is a pity not to imitate it in English. The intelligibility of ideas depends much on whether words touch the spring of the picture-making wheel of the brain; “Soul-wandering”

“THE heralds brought a sacred hecatomb to the gods through the city and the long-haired Grecians were assembled under the shady grove of far-darting Apollo, but when they had tasted the upper flesh and had drawn it out, having divided the shares, they made a delightful feast.” In this description the poet of the Odyssey not only calls up a wonderfully vivid picture of an ancient fête-day, but also shows the habit of mind of the Homeric Greeks in regard to animal food. They were voracious eaters—

ROME, the eternal, begins with a Beast-story. However much deeper in the past the spade may dig than the reputed date of the humanitarian She-wolf, her descendant will not be expelled from the grotto on the Capitol, nor will it cease to be the belief of children (the only trustworthy authorities when legends are concerned) that the grandeur that was Rome would have never existed but for the opportune intervention of a friendly beast! The fame of the She-wolf shows how eagerly mankind seizes on s

PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher—and there were not many that were happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the priest of Apollo in his native village in Bœotia: what kinder fate than this? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly corre

TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the coco de mer which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on bra

THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew. In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the knowledge of good and evil? The early Iranians must ha

NO investigator of early Iran can afford to neglect the Shahnameh of Firdusi, which was as good history as he could make it; that is to say, it was founded on extremely old legendary lore collected by him with a real wish to revive the memory of the past. Firdusi sang the glories of the “fire-worshippers” with such enthusiasm that one cannot be surprised if, when he died, the Sheikh of Tús doubted whether he ought receive orthodox Moslem burial: a doubt removed by an opportune dream in which the

AN Englishman who went to see a Hindu saint was deterred from entering the cave where the holy man lived by the spectacle of numerous rats. The hermit, observing his hesitation, inquired what was the matter? “Don’t you see them?” answered his visitor. “Yes,” was the brief reply. “Why don’t you kill them?” asked the Englishman. “Why should I kill them?” said the native of the land. Finding the whole onus of the discussion thrown on his shoulders, the English traveller felt that it would be diffic

THE idea of a condition of existence in which all creatures are happy and at peace implies a protest against the most patent fact of life as we see it. Western civilisation inherited from the Roman Empire the hardness of heart towards animals of which the popularity of beast-fights in the Arena was the characteristic sign. It was, however, a Roman poet who first pointed out in philosophical language that the sufferings of animals stand written in the great indictment against Nature no less than

What was the view taken of animals by the Jewish people, apart from the fundamental ideas implied by a primordial Peace in Nature? It was the habit of Hebrew writers to leave a good deal to the imagination; in general, they only cared to throw as much light on hidden subjects as was needful to regulate conduct. They gave precepts rather than speculations. There remain obscure points in their conception of animals, but we know how they did not conceive them: they did not look upon them as “things

A FRIEND who was spending the winter at Tunis asked me if it were true that there was any teaching of kindness to animals in the religion of Islam? She had seen with pain the little humanity practised by the lower class of Arabs, and she had difficulty in believing that such conduct was contrary to the law of the Prophet. I replied, that if men are sometimes better than their creeds, at other times they are very much worse. At the head of every chapter of the Koran, it is written: “In the name o

IN Hindu mythology Gunádhya attracts a whole forestful of beasts by reciting his poems to them. The power of Apollo and of Orpheus in taming beasts depended on a far less surprising modus operandi ; like the greater part of myths, this one was not spun from the thin air of imagination. Music has a real influence on animals; in spite of theories to the contrary, it is probable that the sweet flute-playing of the snake-charmer—his “sweet charming” in Biblical phrase—is no mere piece of theatrical

THE snake and the tiger are grim realities of Indian life. They mean a great deal—they mean India with its horror and its splendour; above all, with its primary attention given to things which for most Europeans are nil or are kept for Sunday. And Sunday, the day most calm, most bright, has only a little portion of them, only the light not the darkness of the Unknown. To the despair of the English official, the Hindu, like his forefathers in remotest antiquity, respects the life of tiger and sna

FIFTY years ago the knell of the horse was rung, with due solemnity, by the American statesman, Charles Sumner. The age of chivalry, he said, was gone—an age of humanity had come; “the horse, whose importance more than human, gave the name to that period of gallantry and war, now yields his foremost place to man.” As a matter of fact, the horse is yielding his foremost place to the motor-car, to the machine; and this is the topsy-turvy way in which most of the millennial hopes of the mid-ninetee

I WAS looking idly at the motley Damascus crowd behind whose outward strangeness to my eyes I knew there lay a deeper strangeness of ideas, when in the middle of a clearing I saw a monkey in a red fez which began to go through its familiar tricks. I thought to myself, “How very near that monkey seems to me!” It was like the well-known figure of an old friend. So it is with the animal-lore of Eastern fiction; it seems very near to us; its heroes are our familiar friends. Perhaps we would lose eve

THE last age of antiquity was an age of yeast. Ideas were in fermentation; religious questions came to be regarded as “interesting”—just as they are now. The spirit of inquiry took the place of placid acceptance on the one hand, and placid indifference on the other. It was natural that there should be a rebound from the effort of Augustus to re-order religion on an Imperial, conventional, and unemotional basis. Then, too, Rome, which had never been really Italian except in the sublime previsions