Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/231

Rh danger of detection is also forestalled by laying a dead man's hand on a window sill; and in order to make assurance doubly sure, both preservatives are usually employed. Hence the proverbial saying, "He sleeps as though a dead hand had been carried round him." The desire to procure material for such candles often leads to the commission of crime. An Austrian jurist, Dr. Gross, in his manual for inquisitorial judges (Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter), and the folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin, give numerous instances of this kind, and there is no doubt that the many mysterious murders and ghastly mutilations, especially of women and children, so horrifying to the public and puzzling to the police, are due to the same cause. In most cases the prosecuting attorneys and judges are unable to discover the read motives of such bloody and brutal deeds because they are ignorant of the popular superstitions in which they have their origin, and, for lack of any better explanation, attribute them to mere brutishness, wantonness, homicidal mania, and other vague and unintelligible impulses, whereas in reality they spring from a supremely selfish but exceedingly definite purpose, are perpetrated deliberately, and with the normal exercise of the mental faculties, and can not be mitigated even by the extenuating plea of sudden passion. Crimes of this sort are of common occurrence not only in the semibarbarous provinces of Russia, but also in Austria and Germany, justly reckoned among the most civilized countries of Christendom. On January 1, 1865, the house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in West Prussia, was entered during the absence of the family by a burglar, Gottfried Dallian, who killed the maid-servant, Catharina Zernickel, and ransacked the premises in search of money and other objects of value. Before carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece of flesh out of the body of the murdered girl in order to make candles for his protection on future occasions of this sort. The talismanic light, which he kept in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being caught in the act of committing another burglary about six weeks later. During the trial, which resulted in his condemnation to death, he confessed that he had eaten some of the maid-servant's flesh in order to appease his conscience. This disgusting method of alleviating the "compunctious visitings of Nature" would seem to confirm the suggestion of a writer in the Russkiya Wjedomosti (Russian News, 1888, No. 359) that the thieves' candle is a survival of primitive cannibalism, distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Russian folk song which runs as follows: "I bake a cake out of the hands and feet, out of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the eyes I cast drinking glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating beer, and out of the fat I mold a candle." It is certainly very queer to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the