A case referred to in a recent number of the Peking Gazette, illustrates a strange phase of Chinese superstition.
Tt is probable that many readers would pass the story over as mere folly, hardly worth printing, but we cannot help thinking they would bel wrong to do so; very serious and disastrous consequences have often resulted from these fan-taste beliefs. The instance immediately before us presents a curious picture. The district of Jehol is peculiarly infested with evil doers, but it has the blessing of a zealous Prefect, and here we have n specimen of his activity. Some of his runners are patrolling the streets; they seo a bannerman called Ch'ang-hsi holding another man, and shouting that his son had been decoyed away and wounded by him. The child was examined and found to have three cuts from a sharp instrument, cuts which did not bleed. A man is arrested on suspicion of being implicated in the affair; and after being severely tortured, tells a long story of a fellow named Liu coming to him in October 1871, and telling him to supply him with human hearts and eyes at fifty taels a set. "He provided me," he goes on to say, "with a small packet of powdered drags, a small bottle of drag in solution, a sickle boiled in drug, small bamboo tube, and a writing pencil tube. He told me to put the powder into the pencil tube and blow it in the face of any small child. It would then follow me ina trance to a solitary place, I was then to cut into the region of the heart with the sickle, and hook the heart out; also to hold the eyes n with one hand, and gouge out the eyeballs with the bamboo tube," etc, ete.
Now our first impression on reading this evidence, is one of pity for the unhappy wretch who was reduced by the stress of agonizing torture to utter such a farrago of nonsense, and to charge himself with such monstrous, impossible, and fantastic crimes. We are struck too with wonder at the amazing ignorance and superstition which prevails in the country; yet if we look back to the history of European lands, we shall see that beliefs every whit as preposterous were prevalent a few centuries ago inthe West. The superstitions connected with Fascination are very singular. The following are some of the remedies against its baneful influence, recapitulated in a work published by a German physician Fromman, in 1675. An invocation of Nemesis: the root of the Satyrios Orchis, the skin of a hycona's forehead, the kernel of the fruit of a palm tree, spitting on the right shoe before putting it on, fumigations, sprinklings, neck. laces of jacinth, sapphire, or carbuncle; washings in river water provided silence be kept; licking child's forehead first upward next across and lastly up again." These prescriptions are as absurd as anything can be, but the fact that they are gravely cited in a learned doctor's volume, proves that the belief in Fascination was a firm and distinct belief in Europe, as deeply rooted in the popular mind, two
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.