[857] These are less known, as being less easy of access to travellers, and it is accordingly in connection with these, that we always meet with the most wonderful tales.—B.
[858] This feeling is well expressed in the old and hackneyed adage, “Omne ignotum pro mirifico”—“Everything that is unknown is taken for marvellous.”
[859] Cuvier remarks, that Pliny generally employs this kind of oratorical language when he is entering upon a part of his work in which he betrays a peculiar degree of credulity, and a total want of correct judgment on physical topics.—B.
[860] Being debarred from holding converse, the first great tie of sociality.
[861] Ajasson does not hesitate to style this remark, “ridiculum sane;” as every one knows that the Greeks were more noted for their lively imagination, than for the correctness of their observations.—B. Surely Ajasson must have forgotten the existence of such men as Aristotle and Theophrastus!
[862] Pliny has previously denominated the Scythians “Anthropophagi;” and in B. iv. c. 26, and B. vi. c. 20, he employs the word as the proper name of one of the Scythian tribes.—B.
[863] See B. iii. c. 9.
[864] See B. xxxvi. c. 5.
[865] There can be no doubt, that cannibalism has existed at all times, and that it now exists in some of the Asiatic and Polynesian islands; but we must differ from Pliny in his opinion respecting the near connection between human sacrifices and cannibalism; the first was strictly a religious rite, the other was the result of very different causes; perhaps, in some cases, the want of food; but, in most instances, a much less pardonable motive.—B. Still, however, if nations go so far as to sacrifice human beings, there is an equal chance that a religious impulse may prompt them to taste the flesh; and when once this has been done, there is no telling how soon it may be repeated, and that too for the gratification of the palate. According to Macrobius, human sacrifices were offered at Rome, down to the time of Brutus, who, on the establishment of the Republic, abolished them. We read, however, in other authorities, that in 116, B.C., two Gauls, a male and a female, were sacrificed by the priests in one of the streets of Rome, shortly after which such practices were forbidden by the senate, except in those cases in which they had been ordered by the Sibylline books. Still we read, in the time of Augustus, of one hundred knights being sacrificed by his orders, at Perusia, and of a similar immolation in the time of the emperor Aurelian, A.D. 270. These, however, were all exceptional cases, and do not imply a custom of offering human sacrifices.
[866] Pliny, in describing the Riphæan mountains, B. iv. c. 26, calls them “gelida Aquilonis conceptacula,” “the cold asylum of the northern blasts;” but we do not find the cavern mentioned in this or any other passage. The name here employed has been supposed to be derived from the Greek words, γης κλειθρον, signifying the limit or boundary of the earth.—B. “Specuque ejus dicto,” most probably means “the place called its cave,” and not the “cave which I have described,” as Dr. B. seems to have thought.