sed by the calls
of hunger, and resolved that Jamblichus, one of their number, should
secretly return to the city to purchase bread for the use of his
companions. The youth could no longer recognize the once familiar aspect
of his native country, and his surprise was increased by the appearance
of a large cross triumphantly erected over the principal gate of
Ephesus. His singular dress and obsolete language confounded the baker,
to whom he offered an ancient medal of Decius as the current coin of the
empire; and Jamblichus, on the suspicion of a secret treasure, was
dragged before the judge. Their mutual inquiries produced the amazing
discovery, that two centuries were almost elapsed since Jamblichus and
his friends had escaped from the rage of a pagan tyrant."[123]

This legend was received as authentic throughout the Christian world
before the end of the sixth century, and was afterwards introduced by
Mahomet as a divine revelation into the Koran, and from hence was
adopted and adorned by all the nations from Bengal to Africa who
professed the Mahometan faith. Some vestiges even of a similar tradition
have been discovered in Scandinavia. "This easy and universal belief,"
observes the philosophical historian of the Decline and Fall, "so
expressive of the sense of mankind, may be ascribed to the genuine merit
of the fable itself. We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without
observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs; and even,
in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a
perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant
revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be
instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of
two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator
who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his
surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a
philosophical romance."[124]

_Prejudices arising from our peculiar position as inhabitants of the
land._--The sources of prejudice hitherto considered may be deemed
peculiar for the most part to the infancy of the science, but others
are common to the first cultivators of geology and to ourselves, and are
all singularly calculated to produce the same deception, and to
strengthen our belief that the course of nature in the earlier ages
differed widely from that now established. Although these