Chapter III: Survival in Culture (1)

Survival and Superstition—Children’s games—Games of
chance—Traditional sayings—Nursery
poems—Proverbs—Riddles—Significance and survival in Customs:
sneezing-formula, rite of foundation-sacrifice, prejudice against
saving a drowning man.

When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world, disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages. This is mere permanence of culture; and the special wonder about it is that the change and revolution of human affairs should have left so many of its feeblest rivulets to run so long. On the Tatar steppes, six hundred years ago, it was an offence to tread on the threshold or touch the ropes in entering a tent, and so it appears to be still.[55] Eighteen centuries ago Ovid mentions the vulgar Roman objection to marriages in May, which he not unreasonably explains by the occurrence in that month of the funeral rites of the Lemuralia:—

‘Nec viduæ tædis eadem nec virginis apta
Tempora. Quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit.
Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
Mense malas Maio nubere volgus ait.’[56]

The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives to this day in England, a striking example how an idea, the meaning of which has perished for ages, may continue to exist simply because it has existed.

Now there are thousands of cases of this kind which have become, so to speak, landmarks in the course of culture. When in the process of time there has come general change in the condition of a people, it is usual, notwithstanding, to find much that manifestly had not its origin in the new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to be found; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic knowledge. In dealing with such materials, experience of what actually happens is the main guide, and direct history has to teach us, first and foremost, how old habits hold their ground in the midst of a new culture which certainly would never have brought them in, but on the contrary presses hard to thrust them out. What this direct information is like, a single example may show. The Dayaks of Borneo were not accustomed to chop wood, as we do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. Accordingly, when the white man intruded among them with this among other novelties, they marked their disgust at the innovation by levying a fine on any of their own people who should be caught chopping in the European fashion; yet so well aware were the native wood-cutters that the white man’s plan was an improvement on their own, that they would use it surreptitiously when they could trust one another not to tell.[57] The account is twenty years old, and very likely the foreign chop may have ceased to be an offence against Dayak conservatism, but its prohibition was a striking instance of survival by ancestral authority in the very teeth of common sense. Such a proceeding as this would be usually, and not improperly, described as a superstition; and, indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals, such for instance as may be collected by the hundred from books of folk-lore and occult science. But the term superstition now implies a reproach, and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one, yet in many cases it would be harsh, and even untrue. For the ethnographer’s purpose, at any rate, it is desirable to introduce such a term as ‘survival,’ simply to denote the historical fact which the word ‘superstition’ is now spoiled for expressing. Moreover, there have to be included as partial survivals the mass of cases where enough of the old habit is kept up for its origin to be recognizable, though in taking a new form it has been so adapted to new circumstances as still to hold its place on its own merits.

Thus it would be seldom reasonable to call the children’s games of modern Europe superstitions, though many of them are survivals, and indeed remarkable ones. If the games of children and of grown-up people be examined with an eye to ethnological lessons to be gained from them, one of the first things that strikes us is how many of them are only sportive imitations of the serious business of life. As children in modern civilized times play at dining and driving horses and going to church, so a main amusement of savage children is to imitate the occupations which they will carry on in earnest a few years later, and thus their games are in fact their lessons. The Esquimaux children’s sports are shooting with a tiny bow and arrow at a mark, and building little snow-huts, which they light up with scraps of lamp-wick begged from their mothers.[58] Miniature boomerangs and spears are among the toys of Australian children; and even as the fathers keep up as a recognized means of getting themselves wives the practice of carrying them off by violence, so playing at such Sabine marriage has been noticed as one of the regular games of the little native boys and girls.[59] Now it is quite a usual thing in the world for a game to outlive the serious practice of which it is an imitation. The bow and arrow is a conspicuous instance. Ancient and widespread in savage culture, we trace this instrument through barbaric and classic life and onward to a high mediæval level. But now, when we look on at an archery meeting, or go by country lanes at the season when toy bows and arrows are ‘in’ among the children, we see, reduced to a mere sportive survival, the ancient weapon which among a few savage tribes still keeps its deadly place in the hunt and the battle. The cross-bow, a comparatively late and local improvement on the longbow, has disappeared yet more utterly from practical use; but as a toy it is in full European service, and likely to remain so. For antiquity and wide diffusion in the world, through savage up to classic and mediæval times, the sling ranks with the bow and arrow. But in the middle ages it fell out of use as a practical weapon, and it was all in vain that the 15th century poet commended the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier:—

‘Use eek the cast of stone, with slynge or honde:
It falleth ofte, yf other shot there none is,
Men harneysed in steel may not withstonde,
The multitude and mighty cast of stonys;
And stonys in effecte, are every where,
And slynges are not noyous for to beare.’[60]

Perhaps as serious a use of the sling as can now be pointed out without the limits of civilization is among the herdsmen of Spanish America, who sling so cleverly that the saying is they can hit a beast on either horn and turn him which way they will. But the use of the rude old weapon is especially kept up by boys at play, who are here again the representatives of remotely ancient culture.

As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children’s lessons, early stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind. English children delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth, and New Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus the saw hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other instruments making their proper noises, are alike showing at its source the imitative element so important in the formation of language.[61] When we look into the early development of the art of counting, and see the evidence of tribe after tribe having obtained numerals through the primitive stage of counting on their fingers, we find a certain ethnographic interest in the games which teach this earliest numeration. The New Zealand game of ‘ti’ is described as played by counting on the fingers, a number being called by one player, and he having instantly to touch the proper finger; while in the Samoan game one player holds out so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same instantly or lose a point.[62] These may be native Polynesian games, or they may be our own children’s games borrowed. In the English nursery the child learns to say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed formula of the game is ‘_Buck, Buck_, how many horns do I hold up?’ The game of one holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match is mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing at the guessing-game, where one gets on another’s back and holds up fingers, the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the wide distribution and long permanence of these trifles in history when we read the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the time of Nero:—‘Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy and bade him get up on his back. Without delay the boy climbed on horseback on him, and slapped him on the shoulders with his hand, laughing and calling out ‘_bucca, bucca_, quot sunt hic?’[63] The simple counting-games played with the fingers must not be confounded with the addition-game, where each player throws out a hand, and the sum of all the fingers shown has to be called, the successful caller scoring a point; each should call the total before he sees his adversary’s hand, so that the skill lies especially in shrewd guessing. This game affords endless amusement to Southern Europe, where it is known in Italian as ‘morra,’ and in French as ‘mourre,’ and it is popular in China under the name of _ts’ai mei_, or ‘guess how many!’ So peculiar a game would hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, and as the Chinese term does not appear to be ancient, we may take it as likely that the Portuguese merchants introduced the game into China, as they certainly did into Japan. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures show, used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Romans had their finger-flashing, ‘micare digitis,’ at which butchers used to gamble with their customers for bits of meat. It is not clear whether these were morra or some other games.[64]

When Scotch lads, playing at the game of ‘tappie-tousie,’ take one another by the forelock and say, ‘Will ye be my man?’[65] they know nothing of the old symbolic manner of receiving a bondman which they are keeping up in survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction, which so many rude or ancient races are known to have used as their common household instrument, and which lasts on among the modern Hindus as the time-honoured sacred means of lighting the pure sacrificial flame, has been found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the children, who made fire with it in sport, much as Equimaux would have done in earnest.[66] In Gothland it is on record that the ancient sacrifice of the wild boar has actually been carried on into modern time in sportive imitation, by lads in masquerading clothes with their faces blackened and painted, while the victim was personated by a boy rolled up in furs and placed upon a seat, with a tuft of pointed straws in his mouth to imitate the bristles of the boar.[67] One innocent little child’s sport of our own time is strangely mixed up with an ugly story of about a thousand years ago. The game in question is thus played in France:—The children stand in a ring, one lights a spill of paper and passes it on to the next, saying, ‘petit bonhomme vit encore,’ and so on round the ring, each saying the words and passing on the flame as quickly as may be, for the one in whose hands the spill goes out has to pay a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that ‘petit bonhomme est mort.’ Grimm mentions a similar game in Germany, played with a burning stick, and Halliwell gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is played in England:—

‘Jack’s alive and in very good health,
If he dies in your hand you must look to yourself.’

Now, as all readers of Church history know, it used to be a favourite engine of controversy for the adherents of an established faith to accuse heretical sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mysteries of their religion. The Pagans told these stories of the Jews, the Jews told them of the Christians, and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence in the art of slandering religious opponents whose moral life often seems in fact to have been exceptionally pure. The Manichæans were an especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect considered as their successors—the Paulicians, whose name reappears in the middle ages, in connexion with the Cathari. To these latter, apparently from an expression in one of their religious formulas, was given the name of Boni Homines, which became a recognized term for the Albigenses. It is clear that the early Paulicians excited the anger of the orthodox by objecting to sacred images, and calling those who venerated them idolaters; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun, Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, urging accusations of the regular anti-Manichæan type, but with a peculiar feature which brings his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that they blasphemously call the orthodox ‘image-worshippers;’ that they themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and ‘when they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his mother, thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him in whose hand the child expires, as having attained to the first dignity of the sect.’ To explain the correspondence of these atrocious details with the nursery sport, it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not that the game of ‘Petit Bonhomme’ keeps up a recollection of a legend of the Boni Homines, but that the game was known to the children of the eighth century much as it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply accused the Paulicians of playing at it with live babes.[68]

It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as survivals from a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though now fallen into merited decay. Games of chance correspond so closely with arts of divination belonging already to savage culture, that there is force in applying to several such games the rule that the serious practice comes first, and in time may dwindle to the sportive survival. To a modern educated man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal to chance, that is, to ignorance; it is committing the decision of a question to a mechanical process, itself in no way unnatural or even extraordinary, but merely so difficult to follow that no one can say beforehand what will come of it. But we also know that this scientific doctrine of chance is not that of early civilization, which has little in common with the mathematician’s theory of probabilities, but much in common with such sacred divination as the choice of Matthias by lot as a twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the Moravian Brethren’s rite of choosing wives for their young men by casting lots with prayer. It was to no blind chance that the Maoris looked when they divined by throwing up lots to find a thief among a suspected company;[69] or the Guinea negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his bundle of little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen.[70] The crowd with uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of Atreides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor and help the well-greaved Greeks.[71] With prayer to the gods, and looking up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates, drew three lots from among the marked fruit-tree twigs scattered on a pure white garment, and interpreted the answer from their signs.[72] As in ancient Italy oracles gave responses by graven lots,[73] so the modern Hindus decide disputes by casting lots in front of a temple, appealing to the gods with cries of ‘Let justice be shown! Show the innocent!’[74]

The uncivilized man thinks that lots or dice are adjusted in their fall with reference to the meaning he may choose to attach to it, and especially he is apt to suppose spiritual beings standing over the diviner or the gambler, shuffling the lots or turning up the dice to make them give their answers. This view held its place firmly in the middle ages, and later in history we still find games of chance looked on as results of supernatural operation. The general change from mediæval to modern notions in this respect is well shown in a remarkable work published in 1619, which seems to have done much toward bringing the change about. Thomas Gataker, a Puritan minister, in his treatise ‘Of the Nature and Use of Lots,’ states, in order to combat them, the following among the current objections made against games of chance:—‘Lots may not be used but with great reverence, because the disposition of them commeth immediately from God’ ... ‘the nature of a Lot, which is affirmed to bee a worke of Gods speciall and immediate providence, a sacred oracle, a divine judgement or sentence: the light use of it therefore to be an abuse of Gods name; and so a sinne against the third Commandement.’ Gataker, in opposition to this, argues that ‘to expect the issue and event of it, as by ordinarie meanes from God, is common to all actions: to expect it by an immediate and extraordinarie worke is no more lawfull here than elsewhere, yea is indeed mere superstition.’[75] It took time, however, for this opinion to become prevalent in the educated world. After a lapse of forty years, Jeremy Taylor could still bring out a remnant of the older notion, in the course of a generally reasonable argument in favour of games of chance when played for refreshment and not for money. ‘I have heard,’ he says, ‘from them that have skill in such things, there are such strange chances, such promoting of a hand by fancy and little arts of geomancy, such constant winning on one side, such unreasonable losses on the other, and these strange contingencies produce such horrible effects, that it is not improbable that God hath permitted the conduct of such games of chance to the devil, who will order them so where he can do most mischief; but, without the instrumentality of money, he could do nothing at all.’[76] With what vitality the notion of supernatural interference in games of chance even now survives in Europe, is well shown by the still flourishing arts of gambler’s magic. The folk-lore of our own day continues to teach that a Good Friday’s egg is to be carried for luck in gaming, and that a turn of one’s chair will turn one’s fortune; the Tyrolese knows the charm for getting from the devil the gift of winning at cards and dice; there is still a great sale on the continent for books which show how to discover, from dreams, good numbers for the lottery; and the Lusatian peasant will even hide his lottery-tickets under the altar-cloth that they may receive the blessing with the sacrament, and so stand a better chance of winning.[77]

Arts of divination and games of chance are so similar in principle, that the very same instrument passes from one use to the other. This appears in the accounts, very suggestive from this point of view, of the Polynesian art of divination by spinning the ‘niu’ or coco-nut. In the Tongan Islands, in Mariner’s time, the principal purpose for which this was solemnly performed was to enquire if a sick person would recover; prayer was made aloud to the patron god of the family to direct the nut, which was then spun, and its direction at rest indicated the intention of the god. On other occasions, when the coco-nut was merely spun for amusement, no prayer was made, and no credit given to the result. Here the serious and the sportive use of this rudimentary teetotum are found together. In the Samoan Islands, however, at a later date, the Rev. G. Turner finds the practice passed into a different stage. A party sit in a circle, the coco-nut is spun in the middle, and the oracular answer is according to the person towards whom the monkey-face of the fruit is turned when it stops; but whereas formerly the Samoans used this as an art of divination to discover thieves, now they only keep it up as a way of casting lots, and as a game of forfeits.[78] It is in favour of the view of serious divination being the earlier use, to notice that the New Zealanders, though they have no coco-nuts, keep up a trace of the time when their ancestors in the tropical islands had them and divined with them; for it is the well-known Polynesian word ‘niu,’ i.e. coco-nut, which is still retained in use among the Maoris for other kinds of divination, especially that performed with sticks. Mr. Taylor, who points out this curiously neat piece of ethnological evidence, records another case to the present purpose. A method of divination was to clap the hands together while a proper charm was repeated; if the fingers went clear in, it was favourable, but a check was an ill omen; on the question of a party crossing the country in war-time, the locking of all the fingers, or the stoppage of some or all, were naturally interpreted to mean clear passage, meeting a travelling party, or being stopped altogether. This quaint little symbolic art of divination seems now only to survive as a game; it is called ‘puni-puni.’[79] A similar connexion between divination and gambling is shown by more familiar instruments. The hucklebones or astragali were used in divination in ancient Rome, being converted into rude dice by numbering the four sides, and even when the Roman gambler used the tali for gambling, he would invoke a god or his mistress before he made his throw.[80] Such implements are now mostly used for play, but, nevertheless, their use for divination was by no means confined to the ancient world, for hucklebones are mentioned in the 17th century among the fortune-telling instruments which young girls divined for husbands with,[81] and Negro sorcerers still throw dice as a means of detecting thieves.[82] Lots serve the two purposes equally well. The Chinese gamble by lots for cash and sweetmeats, whilst they also seriously take omens by solemn appeals to the lots kept ready for the purpose in the temples, and professional diviners sit in the market-places, thus to open the future to their customers.[83] Playing-cards are still in European use for divination. That early sort known as ‘tarots’ which the French dealer’s license to sell ‘cartes et tarots’ still keeps in mind, is said to be preferred by fortune-tellers to the common kind; for the tarot-pack, with its more numerous and complex figures, lends itself to a greater variety of omens. In these cases, direct history fails to tell us whether the use of the instrument for omen or play came first. In this respect, the history of the Greek ‘kottabos’ is instructive. This art of divination consisted in flinging wine out of a cup into a metal basin some distance off without spilling any, the thrower saying or thinking his mistress’s name, and judging from the clear or dull splash of the wine on the metal what his fortune in love would be; but in time the magic passed out of the process, and it became a mere game of dexterity played for a prize.[84] If this be a typical case, and the rule be relied on that the serious use precedes the playful, then games of chance may be considered survivals in principle or detail from corresponding processes of magic—as divination in sport made gambling in earnest.

Seeking more examples of the lasting on of fixed habits among mankind, let us glance at a group of time-honoured traditional sayings, old saws which have a special interest as cases of survival. Even when the real signification of these phrases has faded out of men’s minds, and they have sunk into sheer nonsense, or have been overlaid with some modern superficial meaning, still the old formulas are handed on, often gaining more in mystery than they lose in sense. We may hear people talk of ‘buying a pig in a poke,’ whose acquaintance with English does not extend to knowing what a poke is. And certainly those who wish to say that they have a great mind to something, and who express themselves by declaring that they have ‘a month’s mind’ to it, can have no conception of the hopeless nonsense they are making of the old term of the ‘month’s mind,’ which was really the monthly service for a dead man’s soul, whereby he was kept in mind or remembrance. The proper sense of the phrase ‘sowing his wild oats’ seems generally lost in our modern use of it. No doubt it once implied that these ill weeds would spring up in later years, and how hard it would then be to root them out. Like the enemy in the parable, the Scandinavian Loki, the mischief-maker, is proverbially said in Jutland to sow his oats (‘nu saaer Lokken sin havre’), and the name of ‘Loki’s oats’ (Lokeshavre) is given in Danish to the wild oats (avena fatua).[85] Sayings which have their source in some obsolete custom or tale, of course lie especially open to such ill-usage. It has become mere English to talk of an ‘unlicked cub’ who ‘wants licking into shape,’ while few remember the explanation of these phrases from Pliny’s story that bears are born as eyeless, hairless, shapeless lumps of white flesh, and have afterwards to be licked into form.[86]

Again, in relics of old magic and religion, we have sometimes to look for a deeper sense in conventional phrases than they now carry on their face, or for a real meaning in what now seems nonsense. How an ethnographical record may become embodied in a popular saying, a Tamil proverb now current in South India will show perfectly. On occasions when A hits B, and C cries out at the blow, the bystanders will say, ‘’Tis like a Koravan eating asafœtida when his wife lies in!’ Now a Koravan belongs to a low race in Madras, and is defined as ‘gipsy, wanderer, ass-driver, thief, eater of rats, dweller in mat tents, fortune-teller, and suspected character;’ and the explanation of the proverb is, that whereas native women generally eat asafœtida as strengthening medicine after childbirth, among the Koravans it is the husband who eats it to fortify himself on the occasion. This, in fact, is a variety of the world-wide custom of the ‘couvade,’ where at childbirth the husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being put to bed for days. It appears that the Koravans are among the races practising this quaint custom, and that their more civilized Tamil neighbours, struck by its oddity, but unconscious of its now-forgotten meaning, have taken it up into a proverb.[87] Let us now apply the same sort of ethnographical key to dark sayings in our own modern language. The maxim, a ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ was originally neither a metaphor nor a joke, but a matter-of-fact recipe for curing the bite of a dog; one of the many instances of the ancient homœopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the Scandinavian Edda, ‘Dog’s hair heals dog’s bite.’[88] The phrase ‘raising the wind’ now passes as humorous slang, but it once, in all seriousness, described one of the most dreaded of the sorcerer’s arts, practised especially by the Finland wizards, of whose uncanny power over the weather our sailors have not to this day forgotten their old terror. The ancient ceremony or ordeal of passing through a fire or leaping over burning brands has been kept up so vigorously in the British Isles, that Jamieson’s derivation of the phrase ‘to haul over the coals’ from this rite appears in no way far-fetched. It is not long since an Irishwoman in New York was tried for killing her child; she had made it stand on burning coals to find out whether it was really her own or a changeling.[89] The English nurse who says to a fretful child, ‘You got out of bed wrong foot foremost this morning,’ seldom or never knows the meaning of her saying; but this is still plain in the German folk-lore rule, that to get out of bed left foot first will bring a bad day,[90] one of the many examples of that simple association of ideas which connects right and left with good and bad respectively. To conclude, the phrase ‘cheating the devil’ seems to belong to that familiar series of legends where a man makes a compact with the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot-free by the interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion—such as whistling the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to complete his bargain at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured leaves in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediæval compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class of scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting them all run for their lives and catching the last—a story obviously connected with another popular saying: ‘devil take the hindmost.’ But even at this game the stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the folk-lore of Spain and Scotland, in the legends of the Marqués de Villano and the Earl of Southesk, who attended the Devil’s magic schools at Salamanca and Padua. The apt scholar only leaves the master his shadow to clutch as following hindmost in the race, and with this unsubstantial payment the demon must needs be satisfied, while the new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.[91]

It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source is where it has its highest place and meaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or saying has in one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while elsewhere it lies at the level of the nursery, there is some ground for treating the serious version as the more original, and the playful one as its mere lingering survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not to be quite overlooked. For instance, there are two poems kept in remembrance among the modern Jews, and printed at the end of their book of Passover services in Hebrew and English. One is that known as חד גדיא (Chad gadyâ): it begins, ‘A kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces of money;’ and it goes on to tell how a cat came and ate the kid, and a dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the end.—‘Then came the Holy One, blessed be He! and slew the angel of death, who slew the butcher, who killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burnt the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.’ This composition is in the ‘Sepher Haggadah,’ and is looked on by some Jews as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land. According to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon the cat; Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome, till at last the Turks prevail in the land; but the Edomites (i.e. the nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall destroy the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under the rule of Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular interpretation, the solemnity of the ending may incline us to think that we really have the composition here in something like its first form, and that it was written to convey a mystic meaning. If so, then it follows that our familiar nursery tale of the old woman who couldn’t get her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn’t get home till midnight, must be considered a broken-down adaptation of this old Jewish poem. The other composition is a counting-poem, and begins thus:

‘Who knoweth one? I (saith Israel) know One:
One is God, who is over heaven and earth.
Who knoweth two? I (saith Israel) know two:
Two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the
heavens and the earth.’

(And so forth, accumulating up to the last verse, which is—)

‘Who knoweth thirteen? I (saith Israel) know thirteen: Thirteen
divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments,
nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision,
seven days of the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the
Law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant; but
One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth.’

This is one of a family of counting-poems, apparently held in much favour in mediæval Christian times, for they are not yet quite forgotten in country places. An old Latin version runs: ‘Unus est Deus,’ &c., and one of the still-surviving English forms begins, ‘One’s One all alone, and evermore shall be so,’ thence reckoning on as far as ‘Twelve the twelve apostles.’ Here both the Jewish and Christian forms are or have been serious, so it is possible that the Jew may have imitated the Christian, but the nobler form of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a claim to be thought the earlier.[92]

The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often as fresh, and their wisdom as pertinent, as it ever was. Beyond these practical qualities, proverbs are instructive for the place in ethnography which they occupy. Their range in civilization is limited; they seem scarcely to belong to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a settled form among some of the higher savages. The Fijians, who were found a few years since living in what archæologists might call the upper Stone Age, have some well-marked proverbs. They laugh at want of forethought by the saying that ‘The Nakondo people cut the mast first’ (i.e. before they had built the canoe); and when a poor man looks wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say, ‘Becalmed, and looking at the fish.’[93] Among the list of the New Zealanders’ ‘whakatauki,’ or proverbs, one describes a lazy glutton: ‘Deep throat, but shallow sinews;’ another says that the lazy often profit by the work of the industrious: ‘The large chips made by Hardwood fall to the share of Sit-still;’ a third moralizes that ‘A crooked part of a stem of toetoe can be seen; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen.’[94] Among the Basutos of South Africa, ‘Water never gets tired of running’ is a reproach to chatterers; ‘Lions growl while they are eating,’ means that there are people who never will enjoy anything; ‘The sowing-month is the headache-month,’ describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work is to be done; ‘The thief eats thunderbolts,’ means that he will bring down vengeance from heaven on himself.[95] West African nations are especially strong in proverbial philosophy; so much so that Captain Burton amused himself through the rainy season at Fernando Po in compiling a volume of native proverbs,[96] among which there are hundreds at about as high an intellectual level as those of Europe. ‘He fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard,’ is as good as our ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire;’ and ‘He who has only his eyebrow for a cross-bow can never kill an animal,’ is more picturesque, if less terse than our ‘Hard words break no bones.’ The old Buddhist aphorism, that ‘He who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes to windward, which come back to the same place and cover him all over,’ is put with less prose and as much point in the negro saying, ‘Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them.’ When someone tries to settle an affair in the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that ‘You can’t shave a man’s head when he is not there,’ while, to explain that the master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say, ‘The rider is not a fool because the horse is.’ Ingratitude is alluded to in ‘The sword knows not the head of the smith’ (who made it), and yet more forcibly elsewhere, ‘When the calabash had saved them (in the famine), they said, let us cut it for a drinking-cup.’ The popular contempt for poor men’s wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, ‘When a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread,’ while the very mention of making a proverb as something likely to happen, shows a land where proverb-making is still a living art. Transplanted to the West Indies, the African keeps up this art, as witness these sayings: ‘Behind dog it is dog, but before dog it is Mr. Dog;’ and ‘Toute cabinette tini maringouin’—‘Every cabin has its mosquito.’

The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world are to be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-known literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true of their development. At the level of European culture in the middle ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cervantes raised the proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never surpassed; but it must not be forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s wares were mostly heirlooms; for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition of society. As such, they survive among ourselves, who go on using much the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire’s inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly altered or made anew in our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.

Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer intended to be discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The original kind, which may be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle civilization; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient specimens have lasted on in the modern nursery and by the cottage fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong only to the higher grades of savagery; their making requires a fair power of ideal comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races, from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental history which the riddle occupies.

The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles, recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the matter:—_Q._ ‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ _A._ ‘The teeth; we call them men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When we say, they are “adorned with white hip-dresses,” we put that in, that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from them by thinking, “It is men who put on white hip-dresses,” and continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c. _Q._ ‘Guess ye a man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the morning until the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not work by day; he is not seen when he works?’ _A._ ‘The closing-poles of the cattle-pen.’ _Q._ ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for it is known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by lamentation, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass; and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?’ _A._ ‘Fire. It is called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being concealed by the word “man.” Men say many things, searching out the meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is not discernible at once,’ &c.[97] Among the Basutos, riddles are a recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole company of puzzled children. _Q._ ‘Do you know what throws itself from the mountain top without being broken?’ _A._ ‘A waterfall.’ _Q._ ‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it?’ _A._ ‘The voice.’ _Q._ ‘Name the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them.’ _A._ ‘The fingers.’ _Q._ ‘Who is the little immovable dumb boy who is dressed up warm in the day and left naked at night?’ _A._ ‘The bed-clothes’ peg.’[98] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example: _Q._ ‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ _A._ ‘A pineapple.’[99] From West Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never gets to market?’ _A._ ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[100] In Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. _Q._ ‘There are four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ _A._ ‘The Samoan pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four legs. _Q._ ‘A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to the heavens?’ _A._ ‘The smoke of the oven.’ _Q._ ‘A man who stands between two ravenous fish?’ _A._ ‘The tongue.’[101] (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas: _Q._ ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’ _A._ ‘The finger-nails.’ _Q._ ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of by one?’ _A._ ‘A shirt.’ _Q._ ‘What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after it?’ _A._ ‘A needle.’[102]

These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting, into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’ (the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs, crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here they go, there they go; Now they stand still?’ Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: ‘Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, And a long tail which she let fly; And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’

So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptâsva, i.e. ‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks, ‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and seven black horses?’ (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.[103]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again:

Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει
Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;

and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of rudimentary mythology:

Εἷς ὀ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ’ ἑκάστῳ
Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ’ ἄνδιχα εἷδος ἔχουσαι·
Ηι μὲν λευκαὶ ἔασιν ἰδεῖν, ᾖ δ’ αὗτε μέλαιναι·
Ἀθάνατοι δέ τ’ ἐοῦσαι ἀποφθίνουσιν ἄπασαι.

‘One is the father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each
one,
Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder,
White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,
All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish.’[104]

Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the divination of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical example is Samson’s riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like it. The story is that Gestr found a duck sitting on her nest in an ox’s horned skull, and thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with characteristic Northman’s metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as already made into drinking-horns. The following translation does not exaggerate the quaintness of the original:—‘Joying in children the bill-goose grew, And her building-timbers together drew; The biting grass-shearer screened her bed, With the maddening drink-stream overhead.’[105] Many of the old oracular responses are puzzles of precisely this kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle, which ordered Temenos to find a man with three eyes to guide the army, which injunction he fulfilled by meeting a one-eyed man on horseback.[106] It is curious to find this idea again in Scandinavia, where Odin sets King Heidrek a riddle, ‘Who are they two that fare to the Thing with three eyes, ten feet, and one tail?’ the answer being, the one-eyed Odin himself on his eight-footed horse Sleipnir.[107]

The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners and customs is constantly coming into view in ethnographic research. It seems scarcely too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless customs must be survivals, that they had a practical, or at least ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state of society, where their original sense has been discarded. Of course, new customs introduced in particular ages may be ridiculous or wicked, but as a rule they have discernible motives. Explanations of this kind, by recourse to some forgotten meaning, seem on the whole to account best for obscure customs which some have set down to mere outbreaks of spontaneous folly. A certain Zimmermann, who published a heavy ‘Geographical History of Mankind’ in the 18th century, remarks as follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid customs in distant countries:—‘For if two clever heads may, each for himself, hit upon a clever invention or discovery, then it is far likelier, considering the much larger total of fools and blockheads, that like fooleries should be given to two far-distant lands. If, then, the inventive fool be likewise a man of importance and influence, as is, indeed, an extremely frequent case, then both nations adopt a similar folly, and then, centuries after, some historian goes through it to extract his evidence for the derivation of these two nations one from the other.’[108]

Strong views as to the folly of mankind seem to have been in the air about the time of the French Revolution, Lord Chesterfield was no doubt an extremely different person from our German philosopher, but they were quite at one as to the absurdity of customs. Advising his son as to the etiquette of courts, the Earl writes thus to him:—‘For example, it is respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to the King of France; it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor; and the prostration of the whole body is required by Eastern Monarchs. These are established ceremonies, and must be complied with; but why they were established, I defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among all ranks, where certain customs are received, and must necessarily be complied with, though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for instance, the very absurd, though almost universal custom of drinking people’s healths. Can there be anything in the world less relative to any other man’s health, than my drinking a glass of wine? Common sense, certainly, never pointed it out, but yet common sense tells me I must conform to it.’[109] Now, though it might be difficult enough to make sense of the minor details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield’s example from it of the irrationality of mankind is a singularly unlucky one. Indeed, if any one were told to set forth in few words the relations of the people to their rulers in different states of society, he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the King of Siam, kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch, and shake the hand of the President of the United States as though it were a pump-handle. These are ceremonies at once intelligible and significant. Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the custom of drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is closely connected with an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but done with a conscious and serious intention which lands it quite outside the region of nonsense. This is the custom of pouring out libations and drinking at ceremonial banquets to gods and the dead. Thus the old Northmen drank the ‘minni’ of Thor, Odin, and Freya, and of kings likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die out with the conversion of the Scandinavian and Teutonic nations. Such formulas as ‘God’s minne!’ ‘a bowl to God in heaven!’ are on record, while in like manner Christ, Mary, and the Saints were drunk to in place of heathen gods and heroes, and the habit of drinking to the dead and the living at the same feast and in similar terms goes far to prove here a common origin for both ceremonies. The ‘minne’ was at once love, memory, and the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in the ‘minnying’ or ‘mynde’ days, on which the memory of the dead was celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly justifies the writers, older and newer, who have treated these ceremonial drinking usages as in their nature sacrificial.[110] As for the practice of simply drinking the health of living men, its ancient history reaches us from several districts inhabited by Aryan nations. The Greeks in symposium drank to one another, and the Romans adopted the habit (προπίνειν, propinare, Græco more bibere). The Goths cried ‘hails!’ as they pledged each other, as we have it in the curious first line of the verses ‘De conviviis barbaris’ in the Latin Anthology, which sets down the shouts of a Gothic drinking-bout of the fifth century or so, in words which still partly keep their sense to an English ear.

‘Inter _eils_ Goticum _scapiamatziaia drincan_
Non audet quisquam dignos educere versus.’

As for ourselves, though the old drinking salutation of ‘wæs hæl?’ is no longer vulgar English, the formula remains with us, stiffened into a noun. On the whole, there is presumptive though not conclusive evidence that the custom of drinking healths to the living is historically related to the religious rite of drinking to the gods and the dead.