folk, were accordingly objects of superstitious fear to their Scandinavian neighbours and oppressors. In the middle ages the name of Finn was, as it still remains among seafaring men, equivalent to that of sorcerer, while Lapland witches had a European celebrity as practitioners of the black art. Ages after the Finns had risen in the social scale, the Lapps retained much of their old half-savage habit of life, and with it naturally their witchcraft, so that even the magic-gifted Finns revered the occult powers of a people more barbarous than themselves. Rühs writes thus early in the last century: 'There are still sorcerers in Finland, but the skilfullest of them believe that the Lapps far excel them; of a well-experienced magician they say, "That is quite a Lapp," and they journey to Lapland for such knowledge.'1 All this is of a piece with the survival of such ideas among the ignorant elsewhere in the civilized world. Many a white man in the West Indies and Africa dreads the incantations of the Obi-man, and Europe ascribes powers of sorcery to despised outcast 'races maudites,' Gypsies and Cagots. To turn from nations to sects, the attitude of Protestants to Catholics in this matter is instructive. It was remarked in Scotland: 'There is one opinion which many of them entertain, . . . . that a popish priest can cast out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no such power.' So Bourne says of the Church of England clergy, that the vulgar think them no conjurers, and say none can lay spirits but popish priests.2 These accounts are not recent, but in Germany the same state of things appears to exist still. Protestants get the aid of Catholic priests and monks to help them against witchcraft, to lay ghosts, consecrate herbs,, and discover thieves; thus with unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome toward modern civilization. The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science

1 F. Rühs, 'Finland,' p. 296; Bastian, 'Mensch.' vol. iii. p. 202.

2 Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. pp. 81-3; see p. 313.

3 Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 128; see p. 239.

is to consider it as based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the very foundation of human reason, but in no small degree of human unreason also. Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal significance. By a vast mass of evidence from savage, barbaric, and civilized life, magic arts which have resulted from thus mistaking an ideal for a real connexion, may be clearly traced from the lower culture which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in.1 Such are the practices whereby a distant person is to be affected by acting on something closely associated with him-his property, clothes he has worn, and above all cuttings of his hair and nails. Not only do savages high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians like the nations of Guinea, live in deadly terror of this spiteful craft-not only have the Parsis their sacred ritual prescribed for burying their cut hair and nails, lest demons and sorcerers should do mischief with them, but the fear of leaving such clippings and parings about lest their former owner should be harmed through them, has by no means died out of European folk-lore, and the German peasant, during the days between his child's birth and baptism, objects to lend anything out of the house, lest witchcraft should be worked through it on the yet unconsecrated baby. As the negro fetish-man, when his patient does not come in person, can

1 For an examination of numerous magical arts, mostly coming under this category, see 'Early History of Mankind,' chaps. vi. and x.

2 Stanbridge, Abor. of Victoria,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 299; Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 364; J. L. Wilson, W. Africa,' p. 215; Spiegel, 'Avesta,' vol. i. p. 124; Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 195; general references in Early History of Mankind,' p. 129.

divine by means of his dirty cloth or cap instead,1 so the modern clairvoyant professes to feel sympathetically the sensations of a distant person, if communication be made through a lock of his hair or any object that has been in contact with him.2 The simple idea of joining two objects with a cord, taking for granted that this communication will establish connexion or carry influence, has been worked out in various ways in the world. In Australia, the native doctor fastens one end of a string to the ailing part of the patient's body, and by sucking at the other end pretends to draw out blood for his relief.3 In Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets down a ball of thread through her enemy's roof to reach his body, that by putting the other end in her own mouth she may suck his blood. When a reindeer is sacrificed at a sick Ostyak's tent door, the patient holds in his hand a cord attached to the victim offered for his benefit.5 Greek history shows a similar idea, when the citizens of Ephesus carried a rope seven furlongs from their walls to the temple of Artemis, thus to place themselves under her safeguard against the attack of Croesus; and in the yet more striking story of the Kylonians, who tied a cord to the statue of the goddess when they quitted the asylum, and clung to it for protection as they crossed unhallowed ground; but by ill-fate the cord of safety broke and they were mercilessly put to death. And in our own day, Buddhist priests in solemn ceremony put themselves in communication with a sacred relic, by each taking hold of a long thread fastened near it and around the temple.7

Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism are endlessly numerous throughout

1 Burton, 'W. and W. from West Africa,' p. 411.

2 W. Gregory, 'Letters on Animal Magnetism,' p. 128.

3 Eyre, Australia,' vol. ii. p. 361; Collins, New South Wales,' vol. i. pp. 561, 594.

4 Shortt, in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 278.

5 Bastian, Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 117.

6 See Grote, vol. iii. pp. 113, 351.

the course of civilization. Their common theory may be readily made out from a few typical cases, and thence applied confidently to the general mass. The Australian will observe the track of an insect near a grave, to ascertain the direction where the sorcerer is to be found, by whose craft the man died.1 The Zulu may be seen chewing a bit of wood, in order, by this symbolic act, to soften the heart of the man he wants to buy oxen from, or of the woman he wants for a wife.2 The Obi-man of West Africa makes his packet of grave-dust, blood, and bones, that this suggestive representation of death may bring his enemy to the grave.3 The Khond sets up the iron arrow of the War-god in a basket of rice, and judges from its standing upright that war must be kept up also, or from its falling that the quarrel may be let fall too; and when he tortures human victims sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, he rejoices to see them shed plentiful tears, which betoken copious showers to fall upon his land. These are fair examples of the symbolic magic of the lower races, and they are fully rivalled in superstitions which still hold their ground in Europe. With quaint simplicity, the German cottager declares that if a dog howls looking downward, it portends a death; but if upward, then a recovery from sickness.5 Locks must be opened and bolts drawn in a dying man's house, that his soul may not be held fast. The Hessian lad thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl's cap in his pocket-a symbolic way of repudiating manhood. Modern Servians, dancing and singing, lead about a little girl dressed in leaves and flowers, and pour bowls of water over her to make the rain come.8 Sailors becalmed will sometimes

1 Oldfield, in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 246.

2 Grout, Zulu-land,' p. 134.

3 See specimen and description in the Christy Museum. Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 130, 363.

5 Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' p. 31.

6 R. Hunt, 'Pop. Rom. of W. of England,' 2nd ser. p. 165; Brand, Pop.

Ant.' vol. ii. p. 231.

7 Wuttke, p. 100.

8

Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 560.

whistle for a wind; but in other weather they hate whistling at sea, which raises a whistling gale.1 Fish, says the Cornishman, should be eaten from the tail towards the head, to bring the other fishes' heads towards the shore, for eating them the wrong way turns them from the coast.2 He who has cut himself should rub the knife with fat, and as it dries, the wound will heal; this is a lingering survival from days when recipes for sympathetic ointment were to be found in the Pharmacopoeia.3 Fanciful as these notions are, it should be borne in mind that they come fairly under definite mental law, depending as they do on a principle of ideal association, of which we can quite understand the mental action, though we deny its practical results. The clever Lord Chesterfield, too clever to understand folly, may again be cited to prove this. He relates in one of his letters that the king had been ill, and that people generally expected the illness to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the Tower, about the king's age, had just died. 'So wild and capricious is the human mind,' he exclaims, by way of comment. But indeed the thought was neither wild nor capricious, it was simply such an argument from analogy as the educated world has at length painfully learnt to be worthless; but which, it is not too much to declare, would to this day carry considerable weight to the minds of fourfifths of the human race.

A glance at those magical arts which have been systematized into pseudo-sciences, shows the same underlying principle. The art of taking omens from seeing and meeting animals, which includes augury, is familiar to such savages as the Tupis of Brazil1 and the Dayaks of Borneo,5 and extends upward through classic civilization. The Maoris may give a sample of the character of its rules: they

1 Brand, vol. iii. p. 240.

2 Hunt, ibid. p. 148.

3 Wuttke, p. 165; Brand, vol. iii. p. 305.

4 Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 125; D'Orbigny, vol. ii. p. 168.

5 St. John, Far East,' vol. i. p. 202; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii.

p. 357.