how far to conveyance from race to race, and how far to ancestral inheritance. Here it has only to be maintained that it was not originally an arbitrary and meaningless custom, but the working out of a principle.1 The plain statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from the superstition and folk-lore of other races, to connect the notions and practices as to sneezing with the ancient and savage doctrine of pervading and invading spirits, considered as good or evil, and treated accordingly. The lingering survivals of the quaint old formulas in modern Europe seem an unconscious record of the time when the explanation of sneezing had not yet been given over to physiology, but was still in the 'theological stage.'

There is current in Scotland the belief that the Picts, to whom local legend attributes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, bathed their foundation - stones with human blood; and legend even tells that St. Columba found it necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the foundation of his monastery, in order to propitiate the spirits of the soil who demolished by night what was built during the day. So late as 1843, in Germany, when a new bridge was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among the people that a child was wanted to be built into the foundation. These ideas of church or wall or bridge wanting human blood or an immured victim to make the foundation steadfast, are not only widespread in European folk-lore, but local chronicle or tradition asserts them as matter of historical fact in district after district. Thus, when the broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the peasants, on the advice to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk and buried him there. Thuringian legend declares that to make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother and walled in. It

1 The cases in which a sneeze is interpreted under special conditions, as with reference to right and left, early morning, &c. (see Plutarch, De Genio Socratis, &c.), are not considered here, as they belong to ordinary omen-divination.

was eating a cake while the masons were at work, the story goes, and it cried out, Mother, I see thee still;' then later, Mother, I see thee a little still;' and, as they put in the last stone, 'Mother, now I see thee no more.' The wall of Copenhagen, legend says, sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent little girl, set her on a chair at a table of toys and eatables, and, as she played and ate, twelve master-masons closed a vault over her; then, with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after. Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge of Arta, that fell in and fell in till they walled in the master-builder's wife, and she spoke her dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-stalk henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him in the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari); but, year after year, the demon (vila) razed by night what the three hundred masons built by day. The fiend must be appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three wives who should come bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers swore to keep the dreadful secret from their wives; but the two eldest gave traitorous warning to theirs, and it was the youngest brother's wife who came unsuspecting, and they built her in. But she entreated that an opening should be left for her to suckle her baby through, and for a twelvemonth it was brought. To this day, Servian wives visit the tomb of the good mother, still marked by a stream of water which trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall. Lastly, there is our own legend of Vortigern, who could not finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a mother without a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of substitutes for such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and the churchyard in like manner handselled by burying a live horse first. In modern Greece an evident

relic of the idea survives in the superstition that the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid will die within the year, wherefore the masons will compromise the debt by killing a lamb or a black cock on the stone. With much the same idea German legend tells of the bridge-building fiend cheated of his promised fee, a soul, by the device of making a cock run first across; and thus German folk-lore says it is well, before entering a new house, to let a cat or dog run in. From all this it seems that, with due allowance for the idea having passed into an often-repeated and varied mythic theme, yet written and unwritten tradition do preserve the memory of a bloodthirsty barbaric rite, which not only really existed in ancient times, but lingered long in European history. If now we look to less cultured countries, we shall find the rite carried on in our own day with a distinctly religious purpose, either to propitiate the earthspirits with a victim, or to convert the soul of the victim himself into a protecting demon.

In Africa, in Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of the city to make it impregnable, a practice once executed on a large scale by a Bambarra tyrant; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba such sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village.2 In Polynesia, Ellis heard of the custom, instanced by the fact that the central pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body of a human victim.3 In Borneo,

1 W. Scott, 'Minstrelsy of Scottish Border;' Forbes Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. pp. 194, 487; Grimm, 'Deutsche Mythologie,' pp. 972, 1095; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 92, 407, vol. iii. pp. 105, 112; Bowring, 'Servian Popular Poetry,' p. 64. A review of the First Edition of the present work in Nature,' June 15, 1871, contains the following: -'It is not, for example, many years since the present Lord Leigh was accused of having built an obnoxious person-one account, if we remember right, said eight obnoxious persons-into the foundation of a bridge at Stoneleigh. Of course so preposterous a charge carried on its face its own sufficient refutation; but the fact that it was brought at all is a singular instance of the almost incredible vitality of old traditions.'

2 Waitz, vol. ii. p. 197.

3 Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 346.; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p. 39.

among the Milanau Dayaks, at the erection of the largest house a deep hole was dug to receive the first post, which was then suspended over it; a slave girl was placed in the excavation; at a signal the lashings were cut, and the enormous timber descended, crushing the girl to death, a sacrifice to the spirits. St. John saw a milder form of the rite performed, when the chief of the Quop Dayaks set up a flagstaff near his house, a chicken being thrown in to be crushed by the descending pole.1 More cultured nations of Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages the rite of the foundation-sacrifice. A 17th century account of Japan mentions the belief there that a wall laid on the body of a willing human victim would be secure from accident; accordingly, when a great wall was to be built, some wretched slave would offer himself as foundation, lying down in the trench to be crushed by the heavy stones lowered upon him.2 When the gates of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, were built about 1780, as Mason relates on the evidence of an eye-witness, a criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon. Thus it appears that such stories as that of the human victims buried for spirit watchers under the gates of Mandalay, of the queen who was drowned in a Burmese reservoir to make the dyke safe, of the hero whose divided body was buried under the fortress of Thatung to make it impregnable, are the records, whether in historical or mythical form, of the actual customs of the

1 St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 46; see Bastian, vol. ii. p. 407. I am indebted to Mr. R. K. Douglas for a perfect example of one meaning of the foundation-sacrifice, from the Chinese book, 'Yuh hea ke' ('Jewelled Casket of Divination'): 'Before beginning to build, the workmen should sacrifice to the gods of the neighbourhood, of the earth and wood. Should the carpenters be very apprehensive of the building falling, they, when fixing a post, should take something living and put it beneath, and lower the post on it, and to liberate [the evil influences] they should strike the post with an axe and repeat

"It is well, it is well,

May those who live within

Be ever warm and well fed.""

2 Caron, Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 623.

land. Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjab, the foundation of the south-east bastion gave way so repeatedly that he had recourse to a soothsayer, who assured him that it would never stand until the blood of an only son was shed there, wherefore the only son of a widow was sacrificed.2 It is thus plain that hideous rites, of which Europe has scarcely kept up more than the dim memory, have held fast their ancient practice and meaning in Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, among races who represent in grade, if not in chronology, earlier stages of civilization.

When Sir Walter Scott, in the 'Pirate,' tells of Bryce the pedlar refusing to help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning, and even remonstrating with him on the rashness of such a deed, he states an old superstition of the Shetlanders. Are you mad?' says the pedlar; 'you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital injury?' Were this inhuman thought noticed in this one district alone, it might be fancied to have had its rise in some local idea now no longer to be explained. But when mentions of similar superstitions are collected among the St. Kilda islanders and the boatmen of the Danube, among French and English sailors, and even out of Europe and among less civilized races, we cease to think of local fancies, but look for some widely accepted belief of the lower culture to account for such a state of things. The Hindu does not save a man from drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the islanders of the Malay archipelago share the cruel notion. Of all people the rude Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold it a great fault, says Kracheninnikow, to save a drown

1 F. Mason, 'Burmah,' p. 100; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. pp. 193, 214; vol. ii. pp. 91, 270; vol. iii. p. 16; Roberts, 'Oriental Illustrations,' p. 283. 2 Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 107. A modern Arnaut story is given by Prof. Liebrecht in 'Philologus,' vol. xxiii. (1865), p. 682.

3 Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 210; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 318.