s, I will
quote an excellent note preserved by a writer on Cornish
superstitions.

"There is an old 'vulgar error'--that no man can swear
as a witness in a court of law to any thing he has
seen through glass. This is based upon the formerly
universal use of blown glass for windows, in which
glass the constant recurrence of the greenish, and
barely more than semi-transparent bull's eyes, so much
distorted the view that it was unsafe for a spectator
through glass to pledge his oath to what he saw going
on outside. Now, through our present glass, this
belief is relegated to the region of forgotten things,
but nevertheless it has hold on Westcountry people
still. I was, some years since, investigating the case
of a derelict ship which had been found off the Scilly
Islands, and towed by the pilots into a safe anchorage
for the night. Next morning the pilots going out to
complete their salvage, saw some men on board the
derelict casting off the anchor rope by which they had
secured her, but they distinctly declined to swear to
the truth of what they had seen, and it turned out
that they had seen through glass, by which they meant
a telescope. In the same case I found that when these
pilots (men intelligent much beyond the average, as
all Scillonians are) had, on boarding the derelict
(which had, of course, been deserted by her crew),
found a living dog, they had deliberately thrown it
overboard. They explained this act of cruelty to me by
saying that a ship was not derelict if on board of her
was found alive 'man, woman, child, dog, or cat.' And
it turned out, on after-investigation, that these were
the very words used in an obsolete Act of Parliament
of one of the early Plantagenet kings, forgotten
centuries ago by the English people, but borne in mind
as a living fact by the Scillonians."[267]

In some special departments elementary psychological conditions
operate in a considerable degree--operate to produce not waifs and
strays of primitive thought and belief, but whole classes. Thus in the
curious accretion of superstition around the objects connected with
church worship, the same agencies are at work. The general
characteristic of popular beliefs which originated with, or have grown
up around the consecrated objects of