[510] It is interesting in this connection to find in the translation of Lane a passage from the Aǵáïb-el-Makhlooḳát (Marvels of Creation), a work of the thirteenth century: "The tortoise is a sea and land animal. As to the sea tortoise it is very enormous, so that the people of the ship imagine it to be an island. One of the merchants relates as follows regarding it: 'We found in the sea an island elevated above the water, having upon it green plants, and we went forth to it, and dug [holes for fire] to cook; whereupon the island moved, and the sailors said, "Come ye to your place, for it is a tortoise, and the heat of the fire hath hurt it, lest it carry you away." By reason of the enormity of its body,' said he [i.e., the narrator above mentioned], 'it was as though it were an island, and earth collected upon its back in the length of time, so that it became like land, and produced plants.'" Evidently here the tortoise occupies the same place as, in popular tradition, the lunar whale recorded by us in the chapter on the Fishes. Cfr. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, London, 1841, vol. iii. chap. xx. n. 1 and 8, p. 80 seq.—Grein, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, Göttingen, 1857, 1, 235, the Celtic legend of St Brandan and the Pseudo-Callisthenes.
[511] Cfr. the first story of the fourth book of the Pańćatantram, where the king of the frogs invokes the help of a black serpent to avenge himself upon certain frogs who are his enemies, and, instead of this, draws down death upon all the frogs and upon his own son.
[512] Vâr in maṇḍûka ićhatîndrayendo pari srava; Ṛigv. ix. 112.
[513] A similar tradition was current concerning the tarantula (stellio). Ceres, being thirsty, wished to drink; the boy Stelles prevented her, and the goddess transformed him into a stellio. According to Ulpianus, from the stellio was derived the crimen stellionatus.
[514] Cfr. also Afanassieff, vi. 55; Masha (Mary), the wife of Ivan, at first appears as a goose, afterwards as a frog, a lizard, and a spindle.
[515] In the eighth story of the first book of the Pentamerone it is a lacerta cornuta (horned lizard, the moon) which watches over the destiny of the girl Renzolle (the aurora).
[516] It was thus that I heard it recited, but it should, as it appears to me, be corrected both in rhyme and sense, and gragna changed into grama, unless gragna is a verb and stands for grandina (hail); in Italy, there is a superstitious belief that the toads are generated of the first large drops of rain which fall into the dust at the beginning of a tempest.
[517] A similar superstition is current in Germany, as I find in Rochholtz, the work quoted before, i. 147: "Auch die Hauskröte, Unke, Muhme genannt, wohnt im Hauskeller und hält durch ihren Einfluss die hier verwahrten Lebensmittel in einem gedeihlichen Zustand. Dadurch kommt Wohlstand ins Haus, und das Thier heisst daher Schatzkröte. In Verwechslung mit dem braunschwarzen Kellermolch wird sie auch Gmöhl genannt und soll eben so oft ihre Farbe verändern, als der Familie eine Veränderung bevorsteht."—The various popular superstitions concerning the salamander are well known,—viz., that it resists the power of fire, that it lives in fire, that it becomes like fire: "immo ad ignem usque elementarem orbi lunari finitimum ascendere" (according to Aldrovandi), and that, devoid of hairs itself, it causes the hairs of others to fall out by means of its saliva, whence Martial, cursing the baldness of a woman's head—
"Hoc salamandra caput, aut sæva novacula nudet."
Pliny therefore recommends against the poisonous venom which is ascribed to the salamander, the seeds of the hairy and stinging nettle, with broth of a tortoise (which it resembles by its yellow spots). The salamander of popular superstition seems to me to represent the moon which lights itself, which lives by its own fire, which has no rays or hairs of its own, and which makes the rays or hairs of the sun fall.