The herald and mail. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1873-188?, 1874-10-30
NOWADAYS AND LONG AGO.
Interesting Facts Revealing the Com
tinuity of the Human Race.
NJ n CoDvav,s london TaEto. --


The chief interest, perhaps, of this
international oriental congress to its Law
attendants has been the continual start.
ing up of facts which reveal the CONT.
nuity of the human race. We are con.
stantly brought to examine old tales,
coins, proverbs, words belonging to the
distant eastern lands, only to be i'm
pressed with q sense of familiarity un-
derlying their strangeness. 1t is as il
all the intermediate parts of bridge
had been swept away by food, but
whose remaining fragment on the hither
shore so resembles in character the in-
gering buttress on the farther one that
we feel sure they originally belonged
to one structure built by one race. For
example, one morning there were three
members of the congress absorbed in
examining a small tray of old coins in
the British museum. These three were
strangers to each other I; they were of
widely discrepant creeds-one Jewish
Rabbi, another Roman Catholic, the
third radical and heretic So wide
apart as they were in belief ere the ma
tions of the earth ; yet e9s the three
had separated they had together spelled
ont on the coins the infalhble vestiges
of the primeval unity of mankind.
Among these vestiges none was more
notable than those on the columned
coins, of which your American dollar
mark, with its fil.et- bound "Pillars of
Hercules" is the survival. The most
ancient legend of the Pillars of Her
cules states that, on setting out upon
his wonderful voyage in small jar, he
was bitten by serpent !; an oracle told
him that if he sailed westward he would
arrive at certain point and find par
ticular tree, which tree would heal the
wounds made by the serpent. So it
happened, and as a memorial of the in
cident aud the cure, Hercules set up at
the point where it occurred-anciently
Gades. now Cadiz-the two pillars.
Some have suggested that the S which
twines around the pillars in the Span
ish-American dollar-mark is meant for
serpent but this is only speculation.
The oldest European columned coin
shown at the British museum only
about the time of Charles L.-shows
separate twininR S around each pillar,
shaped like fillet, and q crown over
each column. We have only changed it
by removing the two crowns, and max
ing one fillet answer for both columns.
But when we look to the earliest Pheni-
clan coins we find some of them having
only one column, and it has been sug-
gested that the double column might
have only indicated tha the coin was
double in value the single column coin.
But this theory disappears when we
look to the still earlier coins, where we
find the device to be two pillars, sup
,oA~HI,C. ornh rN1oTnlu dnnnfIneY the
doorway of a temple. As there are
really no pillars of Hercules, there can
be little doubt that by them was meant
only the door posts of his ancient tenn
pie; and these, represented on an an
cient coinage, have survived in the col
umned coins of Italy and Spain, and
been carried from the latter country to
be the primitive and the present sign of
the farthest west.
Other ancient coins equally revealed
the origin of those familiar to us. One
belonging to the first Jewish revolt
struck off as the coppers of the Ameri-
can insulrection against England might
have been-was the modification OF a
yet earlier coin, and though itself over
eighteen hundred years old, had on one
copper surface wreath of leaves bound
at the bottom with fillet, and on the
other head that may have been that of
the newest republican president. A
most curious instance of persistence was
revealed by comparison of fine collec-
ton of ancient Hindoo, German and
English coins. They were all radically
the same, but the Hindoo devices were
initiated on the old Ger
man coins, and these again blunderingly
initiated by the English. Taking the
old English coins alone one can hardly
make head or tail of them putting be-
side them the old German some meaning
is shed on them; but when the Hindoo
coins are brought forward the signifi-
canoe of each figure is revealed, and the
inartistic conventional picture on the
western money turns out to have grad
ually deteriorated from the neat artistic
horse, chariot, or tree which graced the
money used by our ancestors on the
banks of the Ganges far away in the
dawn of the commercial life of man
kind.
The continuity of our race which has
been so often illustrated by the discov
ely of the identity of our fairy tales
with the legends and miracles told about
great Oriental deities, is thus found to
be confirmed wherever anything eastern
is investigated. We are using the same
coins and words and ceremonies. Of
course all this has a momentous bearing
upon the authority claimed for some of
the solemn institutions around us. We
had an illustration of this day or two
ago. The learned Prof. Stenzier, of
Breslan, read paper on the ancient
Hindoo idea OF expiation. Having gath
cred out of the ancient Indian books
what were held to be the cardinal sins
many ages before the Christian era, and
the penances by which they were atoned
for or expiated, he showed by quotations
from established Catholic authorities
that the church named still the cardinal
sins and provided similar penances and
means for restoring the guilty to divine
power. There could be no question
abont the facts; the citations were made
from Indian sacred books of unquestion-
able antiquity and compared with ex-
tracts from ecclesiastical books of un-
questionable authority in the Catholic
church,