s. But this vitality is only to be regarded as
the persistence of a stock once proper to English-speaking folk, and by
no means as indicating a diversity of origins.

The chief value of a collection such as the present consists in the light
it may be made to cast on the history of mental processes; in other
words, on its psychologic import.

To appreciate this value, it is needful to understand the quality in
which superstition really consists. This distinguishing characteristic is
obscured by the definitions of English dictionaries, which describe
superstition as a disease, depending on an excess of religious sentiment,
which disposes the person so affected to unreasonable credulity. In the
same spirit, it has been the wont of divines to characterize superstition
and unbelief as opposite poles, between which lies the golden mean of
discreet faith. But this view is inadequate and erroneous.

The manner of conception mentioned has been borrowed from Latin and Greek
writers of the Roman republic and of the Imperial period. In primitive
Roman usage, _superstitio_ and _religio_ were synonyms; both, perhaps,
etymologically considered, expressed no more than that habit of careful
consideration with which a prudent man will measure the events which
encounter him, and determine his conduct with a view to consequences.
_Superstitio_ may have indicated only the _overstanding_ of the
phenomenon, the pause necessary for its deliberate inspection. By Cicero
a distinction was made; the word was now employed to designate a state of
mind under the influence of supernatural terrors. In the Greek tongue a
similar conception was expressed by the word _deisidaimonia_, or fear of
daemons, a term in bad odor as associated with practices of Oriental
temple worship representing primitive conceptions, and therefore odious
to later and more enlightened Hellenic thought. Established as a synonym
of the Greek noun, _superstitio_ received all the meaning which Plutarch
elaborated as to the former; the idea of that excellent heathen, that
true piety is the mean between atheism and credulity, has given a sense
to the word superstition, and become a commonplace of Christian hortatory
literature.

It is, however, sufficiently obvious that the signification mentioned
does not have application to the omens recorded in the present volume,
the majority of which have no direct connection with spiritual beings,
while it will also be allowed that these do