these practices never die out among the conservative and
unprogressive class of peasants; and, every now and then, they attract
the curiosity of philosophers, or win the belief of the credulous among
the educated classes. Then comes, as we have lately seen, a revival of
ancient superstition. For it were as easy to pluck the comet out of the
sky by the tail, as to eradicate superstition from the mind of man.

Perhaps one good word may be said for the divining rod. Considering the
chances it has enjoyed, the rod has done less mischief than might have
been expected. It might very well have become, in Europe, as in Asia and
Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and trying
malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a larger
scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was, indeed,
employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand, the houses
of ladies who had been more frail than faithful. But at the end of the
seventeenth century in France, this research was not regarded with
favour, and put the final touch on the discomfiture of Aymar. So far as
we know, the hunchback of Lyons was the only victim of the 'twig' who
ever suffered in civilised society. It is true that, in rural England,
the movements of a Bible, suspended like a pendulum, have been thought to
point out the guilty. But even that evidence is not held good enough to
go to a jury.

HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY.

'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of the word, is
what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' So says
Mr. Max Muller in the January number of the Nineteenth Century for 1882.
Men's attention would never have been surprised into the perpetual study
and questioning of mythology if it had been intelligible and dignified,
and if its report had been in accordance with the reason of civilised and
cultivated races. What mythologists wish to discover is the origin of
the countless disgusting, amazing, and incongruous legends which occur in
the myths of all known peoples. According to Mr. Muller--

There are only two systems possible in which the irrational element in
mythology can be accounted for. One school takes the irrational as a
matter of fact; and if we read that Daphne fled before Phoebus, and
was changed into a laurel tree, that school would say that there
probably was a young lady called Aurora, like, for instance, Aurora
Konigsmark