22. I repeat, the science of etymology is the standing but for the shafts of every fool. If a witling be so foolish that he can ridicule nothing else, he can succeed against etymology. The true and secret reason of the opposition to etymology is, that the priests knowing it is by its aid only that ancient science can be discovered, have exerted every nerve to prejudice the minds of youth against it. After all, what is it but the science of explaining the meaning of words? Its uncertainty every one must admit. But in this it is only like the words of all languages, in almost every one of which every noun has a great number of meanings. On the meaning of the words, as selected judiciously or injudiciously, depends the value of the translation, which is, of course, sometimes sense, sometimes nonsense. But, I think, one is scarcely less doubtful, or subject to fewer mistakes, than the other. Are there not at least two meanings given to almost every important text of the Bible? The same is the case with etymological deductions.[1] The devotee, as in duty bound, will take the construction of his priest, the philosopher of his reason. And when an etymologist finds out a new derivation, we are as much obliged to him as we are to a lexicographer when he discovers a new meaning in a word which has been before overlooked.
23. The first word of Genesis may furnish an example of what I mean. We have great authorities to justify the rendering of the word either by wisdom or beginning, or both. And it must be for the reader to decide whether it has one or the other, or both—the double meaning.
24. When a translator finds a word with several meanings, than which nothing is more common, it is his duty to compare it with the context and to consider all the circumstances under which it is placed, and his prudence and judgment are displayed, or his want of them, in the selection which he makes. It is precisely the same with etymology. There is no argument which can be brought against etymology which may not be advanced with equal force against translations. In the course of the following work I shall have occasion to return to this subject several times.
CHAPTER III.
ORIGIN OF THE ADORATION OF THE BULL, AND OF THE PHALLIC AND VERNAL FESTIVALS.
1. The Rev. Mr. Maurice, in his learned work on the Antiquities of India, has shewn, in a way which it is impossible to contradict, that the May-day festival and the May-pole of Great Britain, with its garlands, &c., known to us all, are the remains of an ancient festival of Egypt and India, and probably of Phœnicia, when these nations, in countries very distant, and from times very remote, have all, with one consent, celebrated the entrance of the sun into the sign of Taurus, at the vernal equinox; but which, in consequence of the astronomical phenomenon, no longer disputed, of the precession of the equinoxes, is removed far in the year from its original situation. This festival, it appears from a letter in the Asiatic Researches,[2] from Colonel Pearce, is celebrated in India on the first of May, in honour of Bhavani (a personification of vernal nature, the Dea Syria of Chaldea, and the Venus Urania of Persia). A May-pole is erected, hung with garlands, around which the young people dance, precisely the same as in England. The object of the festival, I think with Mr. Maurice, cannot be disputed; and that its date is coeval with the time when the equinox actually took place on the first of May. To account for these facts consistently with received chronology, he says, “When the reader calls to mind what has already been observed, that owing to the precession of the equinoxes, after the rate of seventy-two years to a degree, a total alteration has taken place through all the signs of the ecliptic, insomuch that those stars which formerly were in Aries have now got into Taurus, and those of Taurus into Gemini: and when he considers also the difference before mentioned, occasioned by the reform of the calendar, he will not wonder at the disagreement that exists in respect to the exact period of the year on which the great festivals were anciently kept, and that on which, in imitation of primeval customs, they are celebrated by the moderns. Now the vernal equinox, after the rate of that precession, certainly could not have coincided with the first of May less than four thousand years before Christ, which nearly marks the æra of the creation, which, according to the best and wisest chronologers,
