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Rh funeral rites, and other usages, with a view to the ethnographical survivances indicated by them. He illustrated his subject by several anecdotes drawn from his personal observation. He knew a Calabrian servant who martyrised a waxen effigy of a neighbour whom she suspected of having bewitched her husband. He saw two Sicilians tear with their teeth the heart of a Neapolitan just killed. In a terrible storm which occurred between Syracuse and Catania he saw a tame crow belonging to an old woman who was one of the passengers cruelly beaten and thrown into the sea. When he was a schoolboy, the others always left to him or an English comrade the honour of robbing the fig-trees or cherry-trees, because as they were strangers the Madonna or the saint of the place (who in this respect would represent the Pomona or Vertumnus of older superstitions) would not know them. He saw a Sicilian soldier cut a lock of hair from a Neapolitan whom he had killed, in order to burn it and appease the spirit of the deceased.

May Customs in Provence.—Dr. Beringer-Feraud, a medical officer of distinction in the French navy, contributes an article on this subject to the quarterly Revue d'Anthropologie, published on the 15th July, 1883. Provence retains its old reputation for the joyous observance of the return of spring by the election of a young girl of not more than 15 years of age, beautiful, modest, and angelic in appearance, to represent the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of May, placing her on a seat adorned with verdure, covering her with a long white veil, and raining over her roses and other flowers while she sits like a charming statue. The custom is indeed older far than Christianity, for the feast of Maia is said to have been celebrated with great pomp from the very time of the founding of the city of Marseilles, which tradition carries back to 600 years before Christ, if not even earlier. The May-day of our own times is therefore a purely mythological reminiscence of the worship of the goddess Maia. The circumstance that Maia was the mother of Mercury by Jupiter, and that the May-day festivities are in honour of innocence and chastity, does not appear to the author to be in contradiction of his view. He hopes that observances which have lasted for so long a time and through danger so great may continue to exist even in the pre-occupations of the present sombre and feverish times.