and in the same manner as some of the festivals and customs of Christian countries are directlytraceable to heathen times, so no doubt many of the religious observances of ancient times wererelics of what was even then a dim past.
Whatever we may think of the etymology of the word as given by Cicero,[1] Lactantius,[2] or Lucretius,[3] there is much to be said in favour of Dr. E. B. Tylor's[4] view of superstition being "the standing over of old habits into the midst of a new and changed state of things—of the retention of ancient practices for ceremonial purposes, long after they had been superseded for the commonplace uses of ordinary life."
Such a standing over of old customs we seem to discover among most of the civilized peoples of antiquity. Turning to Egypt and Western Asia, the early home of European civilization, we find from Herodotus[5] and from Diodorus Siculus,[6] that in the rite of embalming, though the brain was removed by a crooked iron, yet the body was cut open by a sharp Ethiopian stone.
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Egypt.—Fig. 1.
In several European museums are preserved thin, flat, leaf-shaped knives of cherty flint found in Egypt, some of which will be mentioned in subsequent pages. In character of workmanship their correspondence with the flint knives or daggers of Scandinavia is most striking. Many, however, are provided with a tang at one end at the back of the blade, and in this respect resemble metallic blades intended to be mounted by means of a tang driven into the haft.
In the British Museum is an Egyptian dagger-like instrument of flint, from the Hay collection, still mounted in its original wooden handle, apparently by a central tang, and with remains of its skin sheath. It is shown on the scale of one-fourth in Fig. 1. There is also a polished stone knife broken at the handle, which bears upon it in hieroglyphical characters the name of Ptahmes, an officer.
Curiously enough the bodies of the chiefs or Menceys of the Guanches in Teneriffe[7] were also cut open by particular persons set apart for the office with knives made of sharp pieces of obsidian.
