hed to Cronus, or attracted into the
cycle of which he is centre, without any particular reason, beyond the
law which makes detached myths crystallise round any celebrated name.
To look further is, perhaps, _chercher raison ou il n'y en a pas_.

The conclusion of the story of Cronus runs thus: He wedded his sister,
Rhea, and begat children--Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and, lastly,
Zeus. 'And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them, each that came
to their mother's knees from her holy womb, with this intent, that
none other of the proud children of Uranus should hold kingly sway
among the Immortals.' Cronus showed a ruling father's usual jealousy
of his heirs. It was a case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich. But
Cronus (acting in a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by
cannibals) swallowed his children instead of merely imprisoning them.
Heaven and Earth had warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could
think of no safer plan than that which he adopted. When Rhea was about
to become the mother of Zeus, she fled to Crete. Here Zeus was born,
and when Cronus (in pursuit of his usual policy) asked for the baby,
he was presented with a stone wrapped up in swaddling bands. After
swallowing the stone, Cronus was easy in his mind; but Zeus grew up,
administered a dose to his father, and compelled him to disgorge. 'The
stone came forth first, as he had swallowed it last.'[39] The other
children also emerged, all alive and well. Zeus fixed the stone at
Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it.[40] It
was not a large stone, Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used to
anoint it with oil and wrap it up in wool on feast-days. All Greek
temples had their fetich-stones, and each stone had its legend. This
was the story of the Delphian stone, and of the fetichism which
survived the early years of Christianity. A very pretty story it is.
Savages more frequently smear their fetich-stones with red paint than
daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from Theophrastus'
account of the 'superstitious man,' was the Greek ritual.

* * * * *

This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox
Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian
controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative
might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs
in the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its