came unintelligible in the changes
of language, and so had to be accepted as a proper name, Cronos--a god
who swallows things at large.

Where is the proof of such endurance of intelligible phrases with just
the one central necessary word obsolete and changed into a mysterious
proper name? The world is full of proper names which have lost their
meaning--Athene, Achilles, Artemis, and so on but we need proof that
poetical sayings, or riddles, survive and are intelligible except one
word, which, being unintelligible, becomes a proper name. Riddles, of
course, prove nothing of this kind:--

Thy riddle is easy
Blind Gest
To read!

Yet Mr. Max Muller offers the suggestion that the obscurity of many of
these names of mythical gods and heroes 'may be due . . . to the riddles
to which they had given rise, and which would have ceased to be riddles
if the names had been clear and intelligible, like those of Helios and
Selene' (i. 92). People, he thinks, in making riddles 'would avoid the
ordinary appellatives, and the use of little-known names in most
mythologies would thus find an intelligible explanation.' Again, 'we can
see how essential it was that in such mythological riddles the principal
agents should not be called by their regular names.' This last remark,
indeed, is obvious. To return to the Norse riddle of the Dark One that
swallows wood and water. It would never do in a riddle to call the Dark
One by his ordinary name, 'Mist.' You would not amuse a rural audience
by asking 'What is the mist that swallows wood and water?' That would be
even easier than Mr. Burnand's riddle for very hot weather:--

My first is a boot, my second is a jack.

Conceivably Mr. Max Muller may mean that in riddles an almost obsolete
word was used to designate the object. Perhaps, instead of 'the Dark
One,' a peasant would say, 'What is the Rooky One?' But as soon as
nobody knew what 'the Rooky One' meant, the riddle would cease to
exist--Rooky One and all. You cannot imagine se

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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