align="center">MINOR SUPERSTITIONS

A WORLD OF WONDERS.

CHAPTER I.

LONGEVITY OF ANIMALS.

Most scholars are familiar with the quotation “cervi dicuntur diutissime vivere,” which has rendered proverbial the longevity of the stag. Among birds, crows and parrots have also been said to attain miraculous length of days; among fishes, the carp and pike; among reptiles, the tortoise. But modern investigation has sufficiently proved that the number of centuries, variously assigned as the natural age of these birds, beasts and fishes, was, in the first instance, the invention of poets and fabulists, carelessly adopted as authentic by lovers of the marvellous.

It is now ascertained that aloes frequently flower three times in a hundred years, and that three generations of the stag are included within the same space of time.

Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet whose works have only partially reached us, was the first to institute a comparative inquiry into the age of the crow and the stag. Hesiod assigns eighty-six years as the average span of human life; yet he asserts that the rook attains eight hundred and sixty-four years, and the crow thrice as many. Towards the stag, he is still more liberal; declaring that these animals have been known to attain their thirty-fifth century. Considering the age we assign to the world itself when Hesiod flourished in it, no great experience as to the average existence of so sempiternal an animal could have influenced his opinion.

According to many ancient writers besides Hesiod, the stag is the longest lived of animals; and the Egyptians have adopted it as the emblem of longevity. Pliny relates that one hundred years after the death of Alexander, several stags were taken in the different forests of Macedonia, to whose necks that great monarch had, with his own hand, attached collars. This extension of existence is, however, scarcely worth recording, in comparison with the instance commemorated by French historians, of a stag taken in the forest of Senlis, in the year 1037; having a collar round its neck on which was inscribed, “Cæsar hoc me donavit.”

A miraculous interpretation was assigned to this inscription, which has consequently formed the ground-work of a popular error in France. The “Cæsar” of the legend was admitted, without further examination, to be Julius Cæsar, thereby allotting ten centuries as the age of the animal; nay, seventy-seven years more, seeing that Julius Cæsar conquered Gaul forty-two years before the birth of Christ. Nevertheless since the days of Julius, the title of Cæsar had been bestowed on a sufficient number of imperial potentates to explain the inscription on the collar upon more rational grounds: the Cæsar who had thus adorned the stag being in all probability its contemporary. But this was too simple an interpretation to be acceptable to those wonder-seeking times.

Aristotle decided the age of the stag, not from the showing of poets and traditions, but from the indications of experiment. Having dissected a considerable number of these animals, he pronounced their ordinary age to be was from thirty to thirty-six years. Buffon was of a similar opinion, which has been adopted by most succeeding naturalists. It has been established as a law of comparative physiology, that the life of a mammiferous animal is in proportion to its period of gestation, and the duration of its growth. The sheep and goat, who bear their young five months, and whose growth lasts two years, live from eight to ten, The horse, which is borne ten months, and whose growth requires from five to six years, lives from thirty to forty. We are, of course, speaking of the horse in its natural state, uninjured by premature and excessive labour. When submitted to the hands of man, the noble animal is condemned to premature old age, by the application of spur and thong before it attains sufficient strength for the unnatural speed it is compelled to attempt, and the burthens it is forced to bear. Nor, even under these circumstances, is it allowed to attain the span of life assigned by nature; the hand of the knacker being put in request to end its days, the moment its services cease to be profitable to its master.

The camel, which is borne ten months, and requires four years for its bodily development, usually attains the age of fifty. The elephant, requiring a year’s gestation, attains the climax of its growth at thirty, and lives to a hundred. The gestation of a stag, therefore, being but of eight months, there is no reason to infer a deviation in its favour from the laws governing the nature of all other animals of the same genus.

“The stag,” says Buffon, “whose growth requires six years, lives from thirty to forty. The prodigious age originally ascribed to this animal, is a groundless invention of the poets, of which Aristotle demonstrated the absurdity.”

A variety of instances of the miraculous