Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/808

784 them even numbers were connected with earthly things, partaking of the feminine principle of Yang. Odd numbers were looked upon as proceeding out of the divine and endued with the masculine principle. Thirty was called the number of earth, because it was made up by the addition of the even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. On the other hand, 25, the sum of the five odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, was called the number of heaven.

It is generally true that, as lower peoples developed the need of numbers and the power to use them, certain of these numbers came to be surrounded with a superstitious importance and endued with certain qualities which led at once to numerical preferences more or less dominant in all their thinking connected with numbers.

It would certainly be unjustifiable to conclude from the evidence at hand that the preferences shown in the guesses under consideration are directly traceable to some such superstition; and yet one can scarcely prevent himself from linking them vaguely together. Especially is this true when some consideration is given to a probable connecting link as shown in our modern superstitious notions. I have found through a recent study of these superstitions that where numbers are introduced, the odd are used to the almost complete exclusion of the even. For example, I have collected and tabulated a series of more than sixty different superstitions using odd numbers, and have found but four making use of the even. Besides these specific examples there are many more which in some form or another express the belief that odd numbers have some vital relation with luck both good and bad.

It would be impossible to define precisely or even approximately just what sort of a mental state the word "luck" stands for, but one element in its composition is a more or less naïve belief in supernatural and occult influences which at one time work for and at another time against the believer. In its more pronounced forms, the belief in luck lifts itself into a sort of a blind dependence upon some ministering spirit which interposes between rational causes and their effects. In a way one may say that the more or less vague and shadowy notions of luck which float in the minds of people to-day are but the emaciated and famishing forms of a once all-embracing superstition, and that these shadows possess a potency over life and action oftentimes beyond our willingness to believe.

There is another interesting and somewhat curious thing to be noticed in connection with these guesses. There is a persistent tendency to the duplication of digits, or, if one thinks of the numbers as at first conceived in terms of language, a tendency to alliteration. For example, the numbers 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999 occur oftener by sixty-seven per cent than any other