Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/548

530 can find them in his satras, reading somewhat after this fashion: "If it is a man that consults you respecting his future, he will be a mandarin; if it is a girl, tell her she will be married before the year is over. If it is a man who wants to marry, he should be told likewise that he will find a wife within a year. If you are consulted concerning a lawsuit, inform your client that he is protected by a powerful man who will see that he wins it. If a sick man consults you, give him to understand that his illness is not serious, and that it comes from his having offended some power, or from not having fulfilled a promise." All this is not very hard. But the satras containing these revelations and prophecies has lost much of its importance in recent years. It has been stolen, and several copies have found their way into the hands of the sachars, who have very little faith in it. I have, however, seen a literatus consult it seriously, and have heard several persons affirm that it is infallible.

This business is innocent trifling, and the prophecies are not of the kind that lead the seers who sell them into the courts. It is not for predicting good fortune that they are sometimes condemned to death, but for real crimes committed under color of sorcery.

Loup-garous are victims of witches, who cast a spell upon them or cause them to absorb some magical essence. They leave their homes in a state of insanity, fly to the woods, climb trees, or hide in the thickets. They are followed by tigers, who wait till the seventh day, when the hair has grown upon their bodies, and then take them away into the forests to live by hunting. There are stories of women transformed in this way, who have become terrible tigresses, living wholly on human flesh. When a person is afflicted in this way he must be pursued with a pole and struck very hard on the head before the seventh day, the pursuer uttering magical invocations. Then he can be taken home well or convalescent.

It appears from this that Europe has not invented its magic, and that the superstitions which have prevailed there for generations of wizards and witches, ghosts, familiar spirits, loup-garous, love powders and philters, amulets, secret cures, love formulas, magical incantations and exorcisms are also to be found in Cambodia.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

report of the Clerkenwell Public Library, London, for 1897, represents that scientific works are very largely circulated. Biology, including evolution and methods of scientific research, is a very popular subject, the sixty-eight works on it which the library contains on this topic having been issued twenty-eight hundred times during recent years. In this subject two copies of Darwin's Descent of Man have been issued nearly two hundred times, a record which is exceeded only by the most popular novels.