times 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 prefectly. 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.[1] 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 homoeopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the Scandinavian Edda, 'Dog's hair heals dog's bite.'[2] 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
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SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.
