No matter; I will tell all what this piece of antiquity was. _It was the actual instrument through which the oracle of Dodona was announced!_ You see upon it the _swans_ by which Apollo was brought to the Hyperboreans! The _bulbul of Iran_ also attends in the train; and the affinity of this latter bird to the species of _pigeons_, convinced the Greeks that they had really hit off the interpretation of the word _Pheelea_! and that _pigeons_ were, in truth, the _deliverers_ of the oracle. This was the block upon which Abbé Bannier was stumbling. Having learned from some quarter, I believe from Aristotle, that there were some _brass_ appendages contiguous to Dodona, he converts those appendages into _kettles_--a worthy friend of mine would add, _of fish_--“which,” says he, “being lashed with a whip, clattered against one another until the oracle fulminated”!!! As to those oracles themselves, with the registries of which antiquity is so replete, I will here articulate my individual belief. No one who knows me can suppose that I am superstitious; and, for those who know me not, the sentiments herein delivered will scarcely foster the imputation. Yet am I as thoroughly persuaded as I am of my personal consciousness, that some prescience they did possess, conducted partly by human fraud, and partly by spiritual co-operation. There is no question but that there must have been some _supernatural_ agency in the business; for _human_ skill and human sagacity could never penetrate the deep _intricacies_ of doubt, and the important _pregnancies_ of time which they have _foreshown_.[533] Porphyry, in his book _De Dæmonibus_, and Iamblichus in his _De Mysteriis_, expressly mention that _demons_ were in every case the authors of oracles. Without going all this length, we may readily allow that they had perhaps a great share in them; neither will the ambiguity in which their answers were sometimes couched detract anything from this admission, because the spirits themselves, when ignorant of any contingency, would, of course, try to screen their defect by the vagueness of conjectures, in order that if the issue did not correspond with their advice, it may be supposed owing to misinterpretation. The instance of Crœsus and the Delphian oracle was an interesting event. He sent to all the oracles on the same day this question for solution, viz. “What is Crœsus, the son of Alyattes, King of Lydia, now doing?” That of Delphi answered thus: “I know the number of the sand of Libya, the measure of the ocean--the secrets of the silent and dumb lie open to me--_I smell the odour of a lamb and tortoise boiling together in a brazen cauldron; brass is under and brass above the flesh_.”