they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the sea. ... And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been swallowed up with all its multitude.'[1]
Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights' story, which at first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older than the date when the 'Thousand and One Nights' were edited. When, in Henry of Veldeck's 12th century poem, Duke Ernest and his companions sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and are themselves dragged in below it among 'many a work of keels,' whose masts stand like a forest.[2] Turning from tale-tellers to grave geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at sea. This quaint notion is to be found in 'Sir John
- ↑ 'Acts of Peter and Paul,' trans. by A. Walker, in Ante-Nicene Library, vol. xvi. p. 257; F. F. Tuckett in 'Nature,' Oct. 20, 1870. See Lyell, 'Principles of Geology,' ch. xxx.; Phillips, 'Vesuvius,' p. 244.
- ↑ Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. i. pp. 161, 217; vol. iii. p. 78; Hole, 'Remarks on the Ar. N.' p. 104; Heinrich von Veldeck, 'Herzog Ernst's von Bayern Erhöhung, &c.' ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see Ludlow, 'Popular Epics of Middle Ages,' p. 221.
