Phlegon, a freedman of Adrian, who was the ocular witness of these facts, and relates them in a private letter, adds that he had to exercise his authority to calm a place disturbed by so extraordinary an event, and he finishes his story with the following words: “If you think fit to inform the emperor, let me know, that I may send some of those who have been witnesses of these things.” The history of Philinnium is therefore well authenticated. A great German poet[150] has made it the subject of a ballad which everyone knows under the title of the _Bride of Corinth_. He supposes that the girl’s parents were Christians, and this gives him the opportunity to make a powerful poetic contrast between human passions and the duties of religion. The mediæval demonographers have not failed to explain the resurrection, or possibly the apparent death of the young Greek lady, as a diabolical obsession. On our own part, we recognise an hysterical coma accompanied by lucid somnambulism; the father and mother of Philinnium killed her by their rough awakening and public imagination exaggerated all the circumstances of this history.[151] The terrestrial Mercury, to whom sacrifices were ordained by diviners, is no other than the Astral Light personified. It is the fluidic genius of the earth, fatal for those who arouse it without knowing how to direct; it is the focus of physical life and the magnetised receptacle of death. This blind force, which the power of Christianity enchained and cast into the abyss, meaning into the centre of the earth, made its last efforts and manifested its final convulsions by monstrous births among barbarians. There is scarcely a district in which the preachers of the gospel did not have to contend with animals in hideous forms, being incarnations of idolatry in its death-throes. The _vouivres_, _graouillis_, _gargoyles_, _tarasques_ are not allegorical only; it is certain that moral disorders produce physical deformities and do, to some extent, realise the frightful forms attributed by tradition to demons. The question arises whether these fossil remains from which Cuvier built up his mammoth monsters belong really in all cases to epochs preceding our creation. Is also that great dragon merely an allegory which Regulus is represented as attacking with machines of war and which according to Livy and Pliny lived on the borders of the river Bagrada? His skin, which measured 120 feet, was sent to Rome and was there preserved until the period of the war with Numantia. There was an ancient tradition that when the gods were angered by extraordinary crimes, they sent monsters upon earth, and this tradition is too universal not to be founded upon actual facts; it follows that the stories concerning it belong more frequently to history than mythology.