n the people of Accadia (who probably introduced the cuneiform
style) and the people of Cappadocia. The connection amounts to this.
Twelve hundred years after Homer, the inhabitants of Cappadocia are
said to have called rue 'moly.' At some unknown period, the Accadians
appear to have influenced the art of writing in Cappadocia. Apparently
Mr. Brown thinks it not too rash to infer that the Cappadocian use of
the word 'moly' is not derived from the Greeks, but from the
Accadians. Now in Accadian, according to Mr. Brown, _mul_ means
'star.' 'Hence _ulu_ or _mulu_ = ~moly~, the mysterious Homerik
counter-charm to the charms of Kirke' (p. 60). Mr. Brown's theory,
therefore, is that moly originally meant 'star.' Circe is the moon,
Odysseus is the sun, and 'what _watches over_ the solar hero at night
when exposed to the hostile lunar power, but the stars?' especially
the dog-star.

The truth is, that Homer's moly, whatever plant he meant by the name,
is only one of the magical herbs in which most peoples believe or have
believed. Like the Scottish rowan, or like St. John's wort, it is
potent against evil influences. People have their own simple reasons
for believing in these plants, and have not needed to bring down their
humble, early botany from the clouds and stars. We have to imagine, on
the other hand (if we follow Mr. Brown), that in some unknown past the
Cappadocians turned the Accadian word for a star into a local name of
a plant, that this word reached Homer, that the supposed old Accadian
myth of the star which watches over the solar hero retained its
vitality in Greek, and leaving the star clung to the herb, that Homer
used an 'Akkado-Kappadokian' myth, and that, many ages after, the
Accadian star-name in its perverted sense of 'rue' survived in
Cappadocia. This structure of argument is based on tablets which even
Prof. Sayce cannot read, and on possibilities about the alliances of
tongues concerning which we 'know next to nothing.' A method which
leaves on one side the common, natural, widely-diffused beliefs about
the magic virtue of herbs (beliefs which we have seen at work in
Kensington and in Central Africa), to hunt for moly among stars and
undeciphered Kappadokian inscriptions, seems a dubious method. We have
examined it at full length because it is a specimen of an erudite,
but, as we think, a mistaken way in folklore. M. Halevy's warnings
against the shifting mythical theories based on sciences so new as th