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.'[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]
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 coun-
1 Mannhardt's 'Zeitschr. für Deutsche Mythologie,' vol. iii. p. 2, &c.: 'Nóg er forthun nösgas vaxin, Barngiorn su er bar bútimbr saman; Hlifthu henni halms bitskálmir, Thó lá drykkjar drynhrönn yfir.'
