was that of a woman, the newly made wife would not live long, and if it was that of a man, the fate of the bridegroom was sealed. If one heard a tingling in his ears it was the deid bells, and news of the death of a friend or neighbor might soon be expected. If knocks were heard at the door of a patient's room, and no person was found there when the door was opened, there was little chance of recovery; and if a man caught a glimpse of a person he knew, and found on looking out that he was nowhere to be seen, this was, says Mr. Napier, a sign of the approaching death of the person seen.* * Yet the apparition of a wraith did not always bode evil. If the wraith was that of a person ill at the time, and it appeared in the forenoon the sick man would recover; a curious belief, which may recall the belief of the Zulus that if they dream of the funeral rites being paid to a man they know to be sick at the time, they may with confidence say on waking, Because we have dreamt of his death he will not die." In the same way the Scotsman, when he saw the spirit of his friend in the morning-that wraith which would so certainly betoken approaching death if seen in the afternoon or evening-thought that the appearance foreshadowed complete recovery.†

If a patient found a dead worm in the well of Ardnacloich in Appin, he knew he must die, as certainly as he knew that had he found a live one there, or in the spring at Strathden, he would have recovered. If a sixpence were dropped into water, and the cross-side (this proves that the superstition belongs to a bygone generation) turned up, then enquirers after the health of an absent friend knew he was well-if not, that he was unwell; and if, when water for the use of an invalid was drawn from the well near the Chapel of Killemorie in Kirkholme parish, the water suddenly rose, good health was anticipated: but if the well of Muntluck in Kirkmaiden was found almost dry when sought for the same purpose, it was known that the distemper was mortal.t

The tapping of a robin thrice at a window, the appearance of a white dove, the entrance of a wild bee into a cottage are bad omens. To hear a hen crow is generally feared; when a cock crows at midnight, they know in Cornwall that the angel of death is passing; the cries of the seven whistlers-the souls of those Jews who mocked at the Crucifixionforebodes disaster.* A raven's croaking fills a Cornwall family with as much dread as the hooting of an owl does a Chinese family, or the chirping of a cricket one in Wälsch-Tirol. Before the death of a farmer, his poultry go to roost at noonday.†

To hear a dog howl in the night has been regarded of old with the same dislike as in modern times, and arises from the belief that the dog can see things which are not visible to other eyes. In the "Odyssey," when the dogs knew Athene, they "fled to the stalls' far side," and the dogs of the north were conscious wenn Hel umgeht. Kabbi Bechai, in his Exposition of the Five Books of Moses, says: Our Rabbins of blessed memory have said when the dogs howl, then cometh the angel of death into the city; but when the dogs are at play, then cometh Elias into the city;" and in the exposition of another Kabbi : Our Rabbins of blessed memory have said, when the angel of death enters into a city, the dogs do howl. And I have seen it written by one of the disciples of Rabbi Jehudo the Just, that upon a time a dog did howl, and clapt his tail between his legs, and went aside for fear of the angel of death, and somebody coming and kicking the dog to the place from which he had fled, the dog presently died." German peasants believe that if a dog barks looking upwards, a recovery may be expected, but if he looks towards the earth, death is certain. In Cornwall the howling of a

*Choice Notes," pp. 13. 15. Hunt, ii. 166; Notes and Queries, 5th Series, ii. 264; Lancashire Folklore," p. 167.

Hunt, 2d Series, p. 166; Denny's "Folklore of China," p. 34; Miss Busk: Valleys of Tirol," p. 439: Choice Notes," p. 13.

"

Odyssey, xvi. 160; Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie," ii. p. 555; Notes and Queries, 5th Series, iii. p. 204.

46

a

dog is always a sad sign, but "if repeated for three nights, the house against which it howled will soon be in mourning." In Lancashire, where the deathtick is still feared, it is reported as curious circumstance" that the real death-tick must only tick three times on each occasion. When we remember that Mr. Darwin says that death-ticks (anobium tessellatum) are known to answer to each other's ticking, or, as he has personally observed, a tapping noise artificially made, it is evident that if a Lancashire maid is disturbed by the three dread ticks, she should wait for answering ticks, or stimulate them by an artificial tick, before allowing her superstitious fears to get the better of her

reason.

The Chinese assert that if bridges are not placed according to the law of geomancy, visitations of small-pox or sore eyes may be expected. If Brandenburg people, when they have killed a pig, find the spleen turned over, there will be another overthrow by a death in the family before the year is out; negroes in Jamaica believe the smell of musk when no musk is near to be a sign of death; to destroy a swallow's nest was in Scotland fit reason for a prophecy that death would overtake the destroyer or some of his family within a twelvemonth; and to rock an empty cradle has every grandam's condemnation, for in that event soon the cradle will be empty indeed.*

Significance is also attached to more personal details or characteristics. A blue vein across the nose has been interpreted in the west of England to mean that the child who was so distinguished could not live long; in Devonshire it is said that if you have a mole on your back you are sure to be murdered, which fate will also overtake the man who is called by the same name as his father, if his father does not fall the victim Both have the alternative of sudden death. Even speaking to one's self is supposed by the Dutch to presage a violent death.*

Enough has perhaps been said without entering into further details to show the extent of the net which superstition set about our father's lives. There was scarcely an act which could not be capable of teaching in some way the uncertainty of human life. It would require a volume to discuss all the recorded examples of bad omens and illustrate their infinite variety, and it is enough here to have gathered only a few cases, as well of familiar as of less known superstitions, to show the extent to which the minds of the ignorant were prepared for the charms of the wise woman, and the supernatural efficacy of words and letters, as well as the narrowing and debasing effect of a daily life which was agitated by every flight of a magpie and every midnight bark of a dog.-Belgravia Magazine.

THE world does not advance, morally, very fast, but one of the Seven Deadly Sins has, nevertheless, become so infrequent that men are a little puzzled to know what it precisely meant. Gluttons are so rare in Western Europe that divines are sometimes perplexed to understand the rank in the scale of sin which old theologians, and especially the early Christian writers, assigned to gluttony, and are inclined to explain the word as covering any kind of inordinate interest in eating, or expenditure of energy upon it. It is very probable

that the condemnation of gluttony did cover gourmandise-which may be carried to the point of distinct viciousness, the duties of life being postponed or sacrificed in the pursuit of a sensual enjoyment of a very inferior kind-and that the belief in the value of controlled asceticism, which can never be quite wanting to Christian philosophers, did something to influence their strong language; but we suspect there was more than this-that actual gluttony, in the ordinary sense, was once a common vice, and a much more injurious one than the West, which is intemperate as

* Hunt, 2d Series, p. 238; Notes and Queries, 5th Series, ii. 184; Choice Notes," p. 8.

to alcohol, but temperate as to meat, is inclined to believe. The testimony of theologians, of historians, and of an immovable tradition, embodied in most, if not all, European languages, proves that among our remote though civilized ancestors it was a common thing for men to cultivate the appetite for quantities of food till it became diseased, and that they gorged themselves with it habitually, till they became almost as incapable of the business and duties of life as drunkards now do. They sought quantity, they ate for eating's sake until they could eat no more, and when they ceased, were as incapable as many animals after a similar indulgence. (It is a popular mistake to suppose that only pigs are gluttons. Horses and cattle will kill themselves with certain kinds of food, and so will individual dogs, while all the wild carnivores are liable at times to eat themselves into temporary imbecility.) They could not work, they could not converse, and they could not think. They were full to bursting, and repeated the feeding until their lives became one long debauch, and their faculties died away as completely as if they had been drunkards, though, of course, the remedy, protracted fasting, was easier to apply. Many of the Roman nobles were gluttons as well as gourmands; indeed, the accounts of their feasts indicate a deep delight in overeating as well as epicurism, and it is probable that the vice existed in Syria, and amid a generally abstemious population a Jew to this day is rarely a drunkard, and an Arab never-may have seemed specially disgusting. Another bit of evidence is the continuance of the practice in the East. Men who eat enormously, who crave for huge quantities of food, and seek in over-eating a torpor which pleases them as much as the calm before stupefaction pleases the drunkard, or apathetic rest the opium-smoker, or kef the tobaccosmoker, are perfectly well-known types throughout India, where every district has its notorious glutton, in China, and among some African tribes. Indeed, Captain Colvile, in his recent ride through Morocco, became convinced that even Moors, who are distinctly abstemious by habit, count in their ranks men to whom over eating is so attrac

tive that they renew the practices of Vitellius, which scandalized even Rome, and obtain by emetics the power of swallowing two or three successive dinners straight on end. Wealthy negroes have been accused of a similar habit of over-eating, Red Indians are constantly guilty of gorging like snakes till they can hardly move, and we are not sure that gluttony in the old sense is wholly unknown even in this country. It is doubtful if the horrible exhibitions of eating-power sometimes made in the country districts are not given by men to whom the excessive supply of food is an enjoyment, while experienced clergymen often doubt whether in one or two households in a village gluttony in the old sense is not chiefly restrained by poverty. They tell astounding stories of quantities consumed on special occasions, though they never indicate gluttony as a popular vice. The disposition appears, too, among children. There are few public schools without a glutton or two, boys who can never be satiated with food, who will eat all day, even to severe illness; and it is noteworthy that such boys are, with hardly an exception, of a hopelessly debased type. The tutor has more hope of anybody. In maturer years, if they reach them, they are restrained by the opinion, or rather etiquette, in favor of moderation, which, considering the decay of the vice, is so curiously strong; but doctors could still, we imagine, relate very singular instances of addiction to food.

Gluttony, however, must be rare. We cannot remember, in an experience of some range and duration, ever to have met an educated man who was addicted to it in the sense in which it becomes a vice, though in two cases we have known men with an appetite for food so abnormal as to be the subject of remark and the cause of nicknames. We question if during the last twenty years a sermon has been preached against it, and certainly it has not become a subject for popular lecturing or Social Science Congresses. There is a society for most things, but no society to regenerate mankind by eating once a day. poor are very often abused, and sometimes very unjustly, for their passion for expensive food-a bit of imitativeness sometimes, and sometimes, as in the

The

fancy of Lancashire for ham, a bit of combined frugality and caste-feeling; but they are seldom denounced for the quantity they devour, and the consumption of the rich is noticed only by doctors. Theologians have given up the subject, or attend to it only to condemn gourmandise-that is, overattention tothe quality of the food eaten, or excessive expense upon the table. Very little, indeed, is said even about these, not perhaps as much as might be said, for the taste for good food, though in itself sound and favorable both to longevity and high vitality, is often carried to a vicious excess; and over-eating has tacitly been dropped out of the area of dominion conceded to the moralists. We should not wonder, however, if it were once more taken up by the Utilitarians, backed by a few of the medical profession. Nothing consumes the general wealth of the world like the feeding of its populations, and it is by no means yet completely settled that the majority of men, once above the imperative restrictions of poverty, do not eat a good deal too much. An idea has been very generally spread that it is healthy to eat often, till certain classes, more especially servants, eat five times a day and the end of the medical aphorism, that those who eat often should eat little, is very often forgotten. The Lancet of September 4th, in a curiously cautious article, hints that the modern world eats too much in positive bulk of food-a statement certainly true of great bread-eaters, a distinct and well marked type and thinks the modern regularity of meals has induced us to regard appetite as the guide rather than hunger, which is the true one. Regularity of meals develops appetite, not hunger. We rather question the previous proposition, as a very hungry man is apt to eat too much; but we believe that the extension of wealth and the extreme public ignorance upon the subject tend to foster a habit of taking too many meals. Men and women eat three in ten hours and a half, breakfast at 10 A.M., lunch at 1.30 P.M., and dinner at 7.30 P.M.—a division of the twenty-four hours of the day which can hardly be healthy. It leaves thirteen hours and a half without food, while in the remaining ten and a half there are three meals.

:

It would be better, we imagine, for sedentary men to reduce theirs to two, taken at considerable intervals; or if that is too worrying, to confine the intercalary meal to the merest mouthful, taken without sitting down, and with no provision to tempt the appetite. Lunch for those who work with the brain is the destruction of laboriousness, and for those who work with the hands is the least useful of the meals. It is very doubtful whether the powerfully built races of Upper India, who eat only twice a day, at 10 A.M. and 10 P.M., are not in the right, exactly equalizing, as they do, the periods of abstinence, though it is difficult to decide from the example of hereditary teetotal vegetarians, the bulk of whose food is out of all proportion to its nourishment. The great evil to be removed is, however, not so much the midday meal, as the profound ignorance, even of educated men, as to the quantity of food indispensable to health, and the quantity most beneficial to it. On the first subject most men know nothing, or at best only the amount of a convict's ration, which is fixed at the standard found most conducive to severe labor in confinement, and is no rule for ordinary mankind. Cannot the doctors tell us some handy rule of thumb about this. They have told us that the beneficial quantity of alcohol is the equivalent of a pint of ordinary claret a day, but what is the beneficial quantity of food? It must differ according to diet, physique, and occupation, but still there must be some formula which will convey in intelligible fashion the average maximum required by men of different weights. We believe most men would be surprised to find how very low it is, and how very much they exceed it, especially in the consumption of meat. Vegetarianism, which some among us exalt as a panacea, has been tried for thousands of years, by millions of people, and has, on the whole, failed, the flesh-eating peoples out-fighting, outworking, and out-thinking the eaters of vegetables only; but between vegetarianism and the flesh-eating habits of well-to-do Englishmen there is a wide distance. Mr. Banting, too, wrote wild exaggerations, but the way in which Englishmen of reasonable intellectual capacities will swallow crumbs of bread,

often not half baked, by the pound at a time, would account even for severer melancholy than that under which they

labor. We want an intelligible rule, to be obeyed or disobeyed, but to be remembered.-The Spectator.

CAMBRIDGE has been recently the scene of considerable excitement, occasioned, our lady readers may be interested to learn, by the claims of their own sex. For some time the idea of female education has been very visibly before the eyes of the University, presenting itself in the form of two additional colleges, and more than a hundred young ladies; and now a proposal to admit these students formally to the Honor Examinations of the University has been adopted by the overwhelming majority of 398 to 32.

Now that this new position has been officially conceded to Girton and Newnham, it may be interesting to our readers to have some sketch of these colleges. The elder of the two is Girton, which was opened in 1869. The buildings, either from economical reasons, or perhaps from some feminine timidity on the part of their founders, were erected two miles from Cambridge, on the Huntingdon Road, or Via Devana. Many virtues may possibly be implanted in the mind by the contemplation of the relics of old Rome, and directness and businesslike habits may perhaps be unconsciously promoted, but the feeling of beauty, we imagine, is not much stimulated in the students by the flat straight line of telegraph poles, skirting a cemetery, and threading one of the most squalid suburbs of Cambridge. The site of the college is also dreary enough, a bare field having been pitched upon by the side of the road, and ten years has added hardly anything in point of picturesqueness; the trees and shrubs are not happy in their soil, and even the ivy does not appear to be vigorous. The buildings themselves are well designed, and are in Mr. Waterhouse's French chateau style, in dark red brick. These form two sides of a square, in which the hall and chief rooms face the road, at some little distance; a wing, which ap

proaches it, having been added subsequently. The size of the building can be gathered from the number of the inmates; these exceed fifty, each of whom has two rooms about equal to the average rooms occupied by undergraduates at Cambridge. The hall, library, and lecture-rooms are in fair proportion. The students are rarely received before the age of eighteen; before entering, an examination has to be passed, and it is expected of each that real interest shall be taken in the studies of the University. The course, as in the case of undergraduates, takes about three years, half of which time, in terms of about eight weeks each, is spent at the college. Many of the university and college lectures are open to the students, and besides female lecturers resident at Girton, there is quite an array of lecturers from Cambridge who give instruction in the college. For some time the results of all this work have been tested informally and voluntarily by the University examiners, the same papers being set to the students as to the undergraduate candidates. These results have been very encouraging. During the first ten years about 41 Girton students have passed the standard for the B.A. degree, and 31 have passed in Honors; 11 in classics, 9 in Mathematics, 7 in Natural Sciences, 3 in Moral Sciences, and I in History.

Some of our readers may remember the sensation caused by the extraordinary success of one of these students, who last year was pronounced equal to the 8th in the First Class in Mathematics.

Newnham, the younger sister, a rival of Girton, dates from 1875, in which year a rather plain but business-like building, in the Queen Anne style, was erected by an association formed to promote the higher education of women. In this case the error was avoided of