the object they encounter first, in order to deduce from it a favorable or unfavorable augury for the business of the day. "I, as a European," says the author who tells us these facts, "was always a glad sight to them;" for "a white man or a woman with child" were good omens; but beggars and deformed persons so unlucky, as even to stop these hapless folk from proceeding in the work they were about during the day on which these boding signs were the first things to meet their gaze (A. I. C., p. 194). Another phenomenon of a somewhat less ordinary kind serves as an omen to the Singhalese, though apparently only in reference to a single fact. There is visible in Ceylon "a peculiar and beautiful meteor," termed "Buddha rays," which "is supposed by the natives only to appear over a temple or tomb of Buddha's relics, and from thence to emanate." The appearance of these rays is taken by believers as a sign that the Buddhist faith will last for the destined span of five thousand years from its founder's death (E. Y., vol. i. p. 337); much as the rainbow is held by Jews and Christians to be the token of a promise that God will never again punish the world by a universal deluge.
The next class of omens need not consist of phenomena which are absolutely beyond the range of physical law, provided they be sufficiently rare to strike the imagination of observers as marvelous occurrences. For example, an eclipse of the sun may be an omen to savage or very uninstructed people; a comet, being more unusual, will seem ominous to nations standing on a much higher grade of culture. Advancing still higher, extraordinary and inexplicable sights in the heavens or on earth will stand for portents to all but the scientifically minded. An example of the latter class is found in the temporary withering of the Ruminal tree, which had sheltered the infancy of Romulus and Remus 840 years before (Tac. Ann., xiii. 58). At the time at which Tacitus begins his history, there were, he says, prodigies in the sky and on earth, warnings of lightnings and presages of future things (Tac. Hist., i. 3. 2). Popular imagination, besides converting natural, but rare, phenomena into omens, invents others which are altogether supernatural. In the disturbed days of Otho and Vitellius, it was rumored that a form of larger than human dimensions had
