least, an innovation.  As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from
the Assyrian Daian nisi, 'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas,
without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and
was a god of the sun.  These derivations, 'shocking to common sense,' are
to be distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning.  Some
Assyrian scholars actually derive Hades from Bit Edi or Bit Hadi--'though,
unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.'  On
the whole topic Tiele's essay {28} deserves to be consulted.  Granting,
then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and other
gods, may have been imported with the strange AEgypto-Assyrian vases and
jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the same basis of rude savage
ideas.  We may push back a god from Greece to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia
to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths
like those which Bushmen tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark
huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh--myths cruel, puerile,
obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from which they
sprang.




THE BULL-ROARER.
A Study of the Mysteries.


As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of
Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-
blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound.  Beginning low,
with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it grows
louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy roar.  If
the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled to the last degree.
If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself, 'Why, that is
the bull-roarer.'  If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he
knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries.  The
roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of the way.  Just as
Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned
the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian
blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and
women out of the way of male, celebrations.

The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar
is a toy familiar to English country lads.  They call it the bull-roarer.
The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make.  I do
not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons.  In the first
place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it
to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age.  In
the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost
infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and
will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants.  Having thus,
I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting
bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the
interests of science) to show how the toy is made.  Nothing can be less
elaborate.  You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid
of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight
inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends.  When finished,
the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a 'fish' used as a
counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be
left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as
in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor.  Then tie a strong piece
of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood and
the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks
called it [Greek]) is complete.  Now twist the end of the string tightly
about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round.  For
a few moments nothing will happen.  In a very interesting lecture
delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a
bull-roarer.  At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled
round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those
chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which
contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace.
But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name,
producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if
some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful
roar.'  Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief
experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in
England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and
unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.

The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history.  To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in
folklore.  The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples,
savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and
civilised mysteries.  There are students who would found on this a
hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend
from the same stock.  But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very
purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards
similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.
There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to
account for this widely diffused sacred object.

The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many
and widely separated lands.  It is found, always as a sacred instrument,
employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia, in New
Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as we have seen, it is
a peasant-boy's plaything in England.  A number of questions are
naturally suggested by the bull-roarer.  Is it a thing invented once for
all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering races, or handed on
from one people and tribe to another?  Or is the bull-roarer a toy that
might be accidentally hit on in any country where men can sharpen wood
and twist the sinews of animals into string?  Was the thing originally a
toy, and is its religious and mystical nature later; or was it originally