of his heirs.  It was a case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich.  But Cronus (acting in a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by cannibals) swallowed his children instead of merely imprisoning them.  Heaven and Earth had warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could think of no safer plan than that which he adopted.  When Rhea was about to become the mother of Zeus, she fled to Crete.  Here Zeus was born, and when Cronus (in pursuit of his usual policy) asked for the baby, he was presented with a stone wrapped up in swaddling bands.  After swallowing the stone, Cronus was easy in his mind; but Zeus grew up, administered a dose to his father, and compelled him to disgorge.  ’The stone came forth first, as he had swallowed it last.’ {52a} The other children also emerged, all alive and well.  Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it. {52b} It was not a large stone, Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used to anoint it with oil and wrap it up in wool on feast-days.  All Greek temples had their fetich-stones, and each stone had its legend.  This was the story of the Delphian stone, and of the fetichism which survived the early years of Christianity.  A very pretty story it is.  Savages more frequently smear their fetich-stones with red paint than daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from Theophrastus’s account of the ‘superstitious man,’ was the Greek ritual.

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This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian controversialists.  Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs in the holy legends of Greece.  Our explanation of its presence there is simple enough.  Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past.  The glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of long ago left the arrowheads, the period of savage fancy left the story of Cronus and the rites of the fetich-stone.  Similar rites are still notoriously practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in India and Africa and Melanesia, by savages.  And by savages similar tales are still told.

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We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine myths is room for the ‘swallowing trick’ attributed to Cronus by Hesiod.  The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis insect.  His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural character, ’the all-devourer.’  The Mantis gets his adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows the Mantis, the god-insect.  As Zeus made his own wife change herself into an insect, for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not much difference between Bushman and early Greek mythology.  Kwai Hemm is killed by a stratagem, and all the animals