GOLDEN FLEECE.

We all know of that strange yellow ramskin which hung dragon-guarded in
the dark groves of Colchis; and how Jason and his Argonauts won the
prize after so many wanderings and besetments. But in our own New World
we have had a far more dazzling golden fleece than that mythical pupil
of old Cheiron ever chased, and one that no man ever captured,--though
braver men than Jason tried it. Indeed, there were hundreds of more than
Jasons, who fought harder and suffered tenfold deadlier fortunes and
never clutched the prize after all. For the dragon which guarded the
American Golden Fleece was no such lap-dog of a chimera as Jason's, to
swallow a pretty potion and go to sleep. It was a monster bigger than
all the land the Argonauts lived in and all the lands they roamed; a
monster which not man nor mankind has yet done away with,--the mortal
monster of the tropics.

The myth of Jason is one of the prettiest in antiquity, and it is more
than pretty. We are beginning to see what an important bearing a fairy
tale may have on sober knowledge. The myth has always somewhere some
foundation of truth; and that hidden truth may be of enduring value. To
study history, indeed, without paying any attention to the related
myths, is to shut off a precious side light. Human progress, in almost
every phase, has been influenced by this quaint but potent factor. Where
do you fancy chemistry would be if the philosopher's stone and other
myths had not lured the old alchemists to pry into mysteries where they
found never what they sought, but truths of utmost value to mankind?
Geography in particular has owed almost more of its growth into a
science to myths than to scholarly invention; and the gold myth,
throughout the world, has been the prophet and inspiration of discovery,
and a moulder of history.

We have been rather too much in the habit of classing the Spaniards as
_the_ gold-hunters, with an intimation that gold-hunting is a sort of
sin, and that they were monumentally prone to it. But it is not a
Spanish copyright,--the trait is common to all mankind. The only
difference was that the Spaniards found gold; and that is offence enough
to "historians" too narrow to consider "what would the English have done
had they found gold in America at the outset."

I believe it is not denied that when gold was discovered in the
uttermost parts of his land the Saxon found legs to get to it,--and even
adopted measures not altogether