has of late been written about Rapanui or Easter Island, but nothing specially to throw light on my suggestion. I would, however, ask for a careful and candid comparison of Fig. 27 with the representation here given of Perseus and Medusa from Selinunte.
Riddle-Story from the Wye Valley.
(Ante, p. 178.)
“Gone a-hunting; and all the game he kills he leaves behind, and all as he doesn’t kill he brings home alive.”
The riddle recorded by Miss Eyre from the Wye Valley must be of venerable antiquity, as Homer himself is said to have “given it up.” It is found in the Homeric Epigrams, a collection of odd scraps which are neither Homeric or epigrammatic; one or two of the poems (notably the Potter’s Song and the Eiresione) are wellknown to folk-lorists. The story is told in the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer, with variants in other “lives” of Homer (the references are collected by Abel, Homeric Hymns, etc., p. 126 f). In the course of his wanderings Homer met some fishermen, and on asking about their catch received the answer,
ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθ’· ὅσα δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα.
“We have left all we caught, and bring all we did not catch.”
According to one version, which the Pseudo-Herodotean biographer is at pains to reject, Homer died of vexation at his failure to solve the riddle. It is difficult to suppose that the Wye Valley borrowed from Greece; and the riddle may well have been invented independently. Does it occur elsewhere?
