A HUNTING LEGEND.
One of the ancient Grecian philosophers, whose life and sayings are deemed worthy of recording, once astonished the people by relating the adventures he had experienced on a long journey through many countries, where he met “speaking trees, pigmies, phœnixes, satyrs and dragons,” and many other things equally marvellous, of which I could not help being reminded when I heard the hunter’s legend.
Of Anaxagoras, another Grecian philosopher, it is related as one of his predictions, that on a certain day a stone would fall from the sun, and on the appointed day, a stone did fall from the sun in a part of Thrace, near the [[116]]river Ægos. And Plutarch states that this stone was not only shown, but in his time greatly reverenced by the Peloponnesians. At another time it was asserted that a large stone fell from heaven, and Anaxagoras said that the whole heavens was composed of stones, and that by its rapid revolutions they were all held together, and when those revolutions get slower, they fall down.
At another time he said, when the weather was very fair, that there would be a heavy rain and storm, and went to the Olympic games in a shaggy skin or leathern dress, prepared for such a change; and as it did rain according to his predictions, the people honored him as though he possessed supernatural knowledge.
But the Indian philosophers tell the wonderful experience of the hunter to make exaggeration and falsehood contemptible and ridiculous.