ere. Is
not the egg, after being emptied of its edible contents, still, in many
hands, as assiduously pierced by the spoon of the eater as if he had
weighing upon his mind the strong superstition of the ancient Roman,
that--if he omitted to perforate the empty shell--he incurred the risk
of becoming spell-bound, etc.? Marriages seem at the present day as much
dreaded in the month of May as they were in the days of Ovid, when it
was a proverbial saying at Rome that

"Mense malas _Maio_ nubere vulgus ait."

And, in the marriage ceremony itself, the finger-ring still holds among
us as prominent a place as it did among the superstitious marriage-rites
of the ancient pagan world. Among the endless magical and medical
properties that were formerly supposed to be possessed by human saliva,
one is almost universally credited by the Scottish schoolboy up to the
present hour; for few of them ever assume the temporary character of
pugilists without duly spitting into their hands ere they close their
fists; as if they retained a full reliance on the magical power of the
saliva to increase the strength of the impending blow--if not to avert
any feeling of malice produced by it--as was enunciated, eighteen
centuries ago, by one of the most laborious and esteemed writers of that
age,[218] in a division of his work which he gravely prefaces with the
assertion that in this special division he has made it his "object (as
he declares) to state no facts but such as are established by nearly
uniform testimony."

In a separate chapter (chap. iv.) in his 30th Book, Pliny alludes to the
prevalence of magical beliefs and superstitious practices in the ancient
Celtic provinces of France and Britain. "The Gaelic provinces," says he,
"were pervaded by the magical art, and that even down to a period within
memory; for it was the Emperor Tiberius who put down the Druids and all
that tribe of wizards and physicians." We know, however, from the
ancient history of France posterior to Pliny's time, that the Druids
survived as a powerful class in that country for a long time afterwards.
Writing towards the end of the first century, Pliny goes on to
remark;--"At the present day, struck with fascination, Britannia still
cultivates this art, and that with ceremonials so august, that she might
almost seem to have been the first to communicate them to the people of
Persia." "To such a degree," adds this old Roman philosopher, "are
nations throughout the