372 ST. MARK’S REST

reaper of some patch of thinly scattered corn; and seeing suddenly a great plain white to the harvest, far as the horizon. That the first-fruits of it might be given in no manner of self-exaltation-Fors has determined that my young scholar should have his part of mortification as well as I, just in the degree in which either of us may be mortified in the success of others. For we both thought that the tracing of this chain of tradition in the story of St. George was ours alone; and that we had rather to apprehend the doubt of our result, than the dispute of our originality. Nor was it, indeed, without extreme discomfiture and vexation that after I had been hindered from publishing this paper for upwards of ten months from the time it was first put into my hands, I read, on a bright autumn morning at Brantwood, when I expected the author’s visit (the first he had made to me in my own house), a paragraph in the Spectator, giving abstract of exactly the same historical statements, made by a French antiquary, M. Clermont- Ganneau.¹

211. I am well assured that Professor Airy was not more grieved, though I hope he was more conscience-stricken, for his delay in the publication of Mr. Adams’ calculations,² than I was, for some days after seeing this anticipation of my friend’s discoveries. He relieved my mind himself, after looking into the matter, by pointing out to me that the original paper had been read by M. Clermont-Ganneau,

¹ [See Horus et Saint Georges d’après un bas-relief inédit du Louvre: Notes d’archéologie orientale et de mythologie sémitique, par Ch. Clermont-Ganneau, 1877. The essay was read before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, on September 8 and 15, 1876, and appeared in the Revue Archéologique for October and November in that year, N.S., vol. 32, pp. 196-204, 372-399. The editors have failed to trace the “paragraph in the Spectator,” and Mr. Anderson does not recollect it. “My conjectures,” he writes, “as to how the dragon story might recollect it. “My conjectures,” he writes, as to how the dragon story might have been transferred to St. George had a curious confirmation a couple of years ago when frescoed tombs were opened at Marissa (in Philistia, south of Joppa), with just the sort of wild inscriptions of names of persons and things which I postulated from the analogy of vases” (see below, p. 380).]

² [John Couch Adams (1819-1892) had made observations determining particulars of the planet “Neptune” during 1841 and 1845, and deposited the results at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in the latter year. But the Astronomer Royal (Sir George Biddell Airy, 1801-1892) took no action, and the publication of the discovery was anticipated by a French astronomer, Leverrier, in July 1846.]

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