s in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea and in Cyprus and
Syria respectively (_vide infra_).

In Greece and Italy, the sweet basil has a reputation for magical
properties analogous to those of the cowry. Maidens collect the plant
and wear bunches of it upon their body or upon their girdles; while
married women fix basil upon their heads.[268] It is believed that the
odour of the plant will attract admirers: hence in Italy it is called
_Bacia-nicola_. "Kiss me, Nicholas".[269]

In Crete it is a sign of mourning presumably because its life-prolonging
attributes, as a means of conferring continued existence to the dead,
have been so rationalized in explanation of its use at funerals.

On New Year's day in Athens boys carry a boat and people remark, "St.
Basil is come from Caesarea".

[264: See Jackson, _op. cit._, pp. 139 _et seq._]

[265: For a discussion of this subject see the chapter on "The
Psychology of Modesty and Clothing," in William I. Thomas's "Sex and
Society," Chicago, 1907; also S. Reinach, "Cults, Myths, and Religions,"
p. 177; and Paton, "The Pharmakoi and the Story of the Fall," _Revue
Archeol._, Serie IV. T. IX, 1907, p. 51.]

[266: It is important to remember that shell-girdles were used by both
sexes for general life-giving and luck-bringing purposes, in the
funerary ritual of both sexes, in animating the dead or statues of the
dead, to attain success in hunting, fishing, and head-hunting, as well
as in games. Thus men also at times wore shells upon their belts or
aprons, and upon their implements and fishing nets, and adorned their
trophies of war and the chase with them. Such customs are found in all
the continents of the Old World and also in America, as, for example, in
the girdles of _Conus_- and _Oliva_-shells worn by the figures
sculptured upon the Copan stelae. See, for example, Maudslay's pictures
of stele N, Plate 82 (Biologia Centrali-Americana; Archaeology) _inter
alia_. But they were much more widely used by women, not merely by
maidens, but also by brides and married women, to heighten their
fertility and cure sterility, and by pregnant women to ensure safe
delivery in childbirth. It was their wider employment by women that
gives these shells their peculiar cultural significance.]

[267: Witness the importance of the girdle in early Indian and American
sculptures: in the literature of Egypt, Babylonia, Western Europe, and
the Mediterranean area. For important Indian analogies and Eg