supernatural powers are acquired by eating the heart of an unborn
babe of the male sex, just as a savage imagines that by eating the
heart of a brave foe he can become indued with his valor. The modern
European cannibal believes that by eating nine hearts, or parts of
them, he can make himself invisible and even fly through the air.
He can thus commit crime without detection, and defy all efforts to
arrest or imprison him, releasing himself with ease from fetters, and
passing through stone walls. This horrible practice has been known
for ages, and is still by no means uncommon. In the first half of the
fifteenth century the notorious marshal of France, Gilles de Laval,
Baron of Rayz, is said to have murdered in his castle near Nantes one
hundred and fifty women in order to get possession of unborn babes.
He was then supposed to have committed these atrocities from lewd
motives, and was also accused of worshiping Satan. A mixed commission
of civilians and ecclesiastics, appointed to examine into the matter,
found him guilty and condemned him to be strangled and burned on
October 25, 1440. In 1429, when he was thirty-three years of age, he
had fought the English at Orleans by the side of Joan of Arc, and it
was probably the desire to acquire supernatural powers in emulation
of the maid that led him to perpetrate a succession of inhuman
butcheries extending over a period of fourteen years, the real object
of which seems to have been imperfectly understood by the tribunal
which sentenced him to death.[30] Löwenstimm cites several instances
of this crime. Thus, in 1577 a man was put to the rack in Bamberg,
North Bavaria, for murdering and disemboweling three pregnant women.
In the seventeenth century a band of robbers, whose chief was known
as "King Daniel," created intense consternation among the inhabitants
of Ermeland in East Prussia. For a long time these freebooters roved
and spoiled with impunity, but were finally arrested and executed.
They confessed that they had killed fourteen women, but, as the
unborn infants proved to be female, their hearts were devoid of
talismanic virtue. Indeed, they attributed their capture to this
unfortunate and unforseeable circumstance, and posed as persons
worthy of commiseration on account of their ill luck. One of the
strangest features of this cruel and incredible superstition is its
persistency in an age of superior enlightenment. Dr. Gross records
two cases of comparatively recent occurrence in the very centers of
modern civilization: one in 1879, near Hamburg, where a woman, great
with child, was killed and cut open by a Swede named Andersen, and
another of like character ten years later in Simmering, near Vienna.
An ordeal very commonly practiced in the middle ages to determine
the guilt or innocence of any one accused of theft was to give him
a piece of consecrated cheese, which, if he were guilty, it would
be impossible for him to swallow. Hence arose the popular phrase,
"It sticks in his throat." Thus Macbeth says, after he had "done the
deed":
"But wherefore could not I pronounce amen?
I had most need of blessing, and amen
Stuck in my throat."
Wuttke states that this custom still prevails in the Prussian
province of Brandenburg, where a person suspected of larceny is
made to swallow a piece of Dutch cheese on which certain magical
letters and signs are scratched. His failure to do so is regarded
as conclusive evidence of his guilt. Various other means of making
inquest for the detection of crime are in vogue, some of them merely
silly, and others mercilessly savage. Thus a mirror is laid for
three successive nights in the grave of a dead man. It is placed
there in the name of God, and taken out in the name of Satan. It
is believed that by looking into such a mirror the person of the
thief can be clearly seen. A bull belonging to a peasant not far
from Perm, on the Kama, died suddenly. The owner declared that the
death of the animal was due to witchcraft, and demanded that all
the women of the village should be made to creep through a horse
collar in order to discover the hag who had wrought the mischief.
This plan was approved by his neighbors, and, although their wives
protested against being subjected to the degrading and for corpulent
women extremely difficult and even dangerous test, they finally
submitted to it rather than remain under the suspicion of practicing
the black art. This performance, which is unquestionably a relic of
Uralian-Finnish paganism, took place on March 16, 1896. The following
instance may serve as an example of the ruthless barbarity to which
such delusions often lead: In December, 1874, a South Russian peasant
in the vicinity of Cherson missed one hundred rubles and went to a
weird woman in order to learn what had become of them. She consulted
her cards and declared that the money had been stolen by a certain
Marfa Artynov. The man was greatly astonished at this response,
because the accused was a highly respected teacher of young children,
and had the reputation of being thoroughly honest. Nevertheless, his
credulity got the better of his common sense, and with the aid of his
neighbors he seized Marfa and carried her to the churchyard, where
he bound her to a cross and began to torture her, beating her with a
knout, suspending her by her hands, and twisting and tearing her neck
and tongue with a pincers. To her cries and entreaties her tormentors
coolly replied, "If you are really innocent, what we are doing can
cause you no pain!" Many of the persons who offer their services
as clairvoyants and seers to a credulous and confiding public, and
whose utterances are accepted as oracles, are professional swindlers.
Thus a young lady moving in the higher circles of society in Vienna
had a valuable set of diamonds stolen. By the advice of a trusted
lackey she consulted a woman, who was reputed to have the power of
divination, and who informed her, contrary to the strong suspicions
of the police, that the theft had been committed, not by any member
of the household, but by a stranger. The young lady was so firmly
persuaded of the truth of this statement that, although urged by the
court to prosecute the lackey, she refused to do so. The evidence
against him, however, was so strong that he was finally tried and
condemned. The pythoness, who had endeavored to exculpate him, proved
to be his aunt and accomplice.
A queer phase of superstition, which in many parts of Europe
seriously interferes with the administration of justice, manifests
itself in the various means of avoiding the evil consequences of
perjury, at least so far as to soothe the pangs of conscience and to
avert the divine anger. This immunity is secured in some provinces
of Austria by carrying on one's person a bit of consecrated wafer, a
piece of bone from the skeleton of a child, or the eyes of a hoopoe,
holding a ducat or seven small pebbles in the mouth, pressing the
left hand firmly against the side, crooking the second finger, or
pulling off a button from the trousers while in the act of swearing,
or spitting immediately after taking an oath. The Russian province
of Viatka is settled by a people of Finnish origin, the majority
of whom have been baptized and call themselves orthodox Christians,
while the remainder are still nominally as well as really heathen.
When they take an oath it is administered by a pope or priest, and a
Russian jurist, J. W. Mjeshtshaninov, describes the method employed
by them to forswear themselves with safety. When called upon to
take an oath, the witness raises the right hand with the index
finger extended; he then lays the left hand in the palm of the right
hand with the index finger pointing downward, and by a crisscross
combination of the other fingers, which probably works as a charm,
the whole body is converted into a conductor, so that the oath
entering through the index finger of the right hand passes through
the index finger of the left hand into the earth like an electric
current. The witness thus feels himself discharged of the binding
influence of the oath, and may give false testimony without laying
perjury upon his soul.
The superstitions which encourage ignorant people to commit crime are
handed down from generation to generation, and have in most cases
a purely local character. In other words, the charms and sorceries
and other magical arts employed to produce the same results differ
in different places, and unless the judges are familiar with these
various forms of superstition they will be unable to understand the
exact nature of the offenses with which they have to deal, and their
efforts to detect and punish violations of the law will be greatly
hampered and sometimes completely thwarted.
The subject here discussed has not only a speculative interest
for ethnographers and students of folklore, but also, as already
indicated, a practical importance for criminal lawyers and courts
of justice in the Old World and even in the United States. The tide
of immigration that has recently set in from the east and south
of Europe has brought to our shores an immense number of persons
strongly infected with the delusions which we have attempted to
describe. Acts which would seem at first sight to have their
origin in impulses of cruelty and brutality are found on closer
investigation to be due to crass ignorance and credulity, and,
although the ultimate motives are usually utterly selfish, there are
rare instances in which the perpetrators of such deeds are thoroughly
disinterested and altruistic, and do the most revolting things, not
from greed of gain, but solely for the public good. In cases of this
kind the most effective preventive of wrongdoing is not judicial
punishment but intellectual enlightenment.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Löwenstimm's studies, printed originally in the Journal of the
Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg, have been made accessible to a
larger class of readers by being collected and translated into German
in a volume entitled Aberglaube und Strafrecht (Berlin: Räde, 1897),
with an introduction by Prof. Joseph Kohler, of the University of
Berlin.
[27] As the Siberian Railway approached the northern boundaries of
the Chinese Empire and surveys were made for its extension through
Manchuria to the sea, great excitement was produced in Pekin by the
rumor that the Russian minister had applied to the Empress of China
for two thousand children to be buried in the roadbed under the rails
in order to strengthen it. Some years ago, in rebuilding a large
bridge, which had been swept away several times by inundations in the
Yarkand, eight children, purchased from poor people at a high price,
were immured alive in the foundations. As the new bridge was firmly
constructed out of excellent materials, it has hitherto withstood the
force of the strongest floods, a result which the Chinese attribute,
not to the solid masonry, but to the propitiation of the river god by
an offering of infants.
[28] See the case of Bridget Cleary, reported in Appletons' Popular
Science Monthly for November, 1895, p. 86. We may add that her
husband, Michael Cleary, was tried for murder and sentenced to twenty
years' penal servitude.
[29] General Code, vol. xiii, edition of 1892, cited by Löwenstimm.
[30] A full account of the trial is given in a Latin manuscript
preserved in the city archives of Nantes.
A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE.
BY J. A. UDDEN.
A western naturalist once said that the geology of Kansas was
monotonous. In one sense this remark is certainly justifiable,
and the same may be said about the geology of some of the other
States on the Western plains. The American continent is built on
a comprehensive plan, and many of its formations can be followed
for hundreds of miles without presenting much variation in general
appearance. Occasionally, however, some feature of special interest
crops out from the serene uniformity, and the very nature of its
surroundings then makes it appear all the more striking. Minor
accidents in the development of our extensive terranes sometimes
stand out in bold relief, as it were, from the monotonous background.
In their isolation from other details such features occasionally
display past events with unusual clearness.
Such is the case with a deposit of volcanic ash which has been
discovered in the superficial strata on the plains.[31] It lies
scattered in great quantities in a number of localities in Nebraska,
Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado, having been found in no less than
twenty counties in the first-mentioned State. It measures from two
to fourteen feet in thickness in different localities, and is mostly
found imbedded in yellow marl and clay, and has a somewhat striking
appearance in the field, due to its snowy whiteness and to the
sharpness of the plane which separates it from the underlying darker
materials. Many years before its real nature was known it had been
noticed and described by Western geologists. Prof. O. T. St. John saw
it many years ago in Kansas, where it appeared as "an exceedingly
fine, pure white siliceous material," forming a separate layer of
several feet, and set off by a sharp line from the buff clay-marl
below. His words describe its usual appearance in other places (see
Fig. 1).
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--STRATIFIED VOLCANIC ASH NEAR MEADE, KANSAS.
(From the University Geological Survey of Kansas, vol. ii.)]
This ash occurs in several outcrops in McPherson County in the
central part of Kansas, where the writer had an opportunity to study
it somewhat in detail a few years ago. Some of the features of the
dust at this place reveal the conditions under which it was formed
with considerable distinctness, and the volcanic episode which
produced it appears strikingly different from the dull monotony of
the ordinary geological work recorded in the terranes of the plains.
It may be said to consist of angular flakes of pumice, averaging one
sixteenth of a millimetre in diameter, and having a thickness of
about one three-hundredth of a millimetre. The most common shape of
the flakes is that of a triangle, or rather of a spherical triangle,
since the flakes are apt to be concave on one side and convex on the
other. In the microscope they sometimes appear like splinters of tiny
bubbles of glass, and this is really what they are (Fig. 2).
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--FLAKES OF VOLCANIC ASH. Magnified about 100
diameters. A, flake with a branching rib; B, fragment of a broken
hollow sphere of glass; C, fragment with drawn-out tubular vesicles;
D and E, plain fragments of broken pumice bubbles. (From American
Geologist, April, 1893.)]
The explosive eruptions which give rise to showers of this kind of
ash, or dust, are due to fusion and superheating of subterranean
masses of rocks charged with more or less moisture. A part of this
moisture escapes in the form of steam at the time of an eruption.
But the viscidity of the ejected material prevents much of the steam
from passing off, and such of the lava as cools most rapidly retains
a certain quantity in solution, as it were. Obsidian is a rock which
has been made in this way. It often contains much of the original
water, which will cause it to swell up into a stony froth when fused.
This volcanic dust has the same property. If one small particle of
it be heated on a piece of platinum foil it is seen to swell up
into a compound bubble of glass (Fig. 3). It is evident that this
is due to the expansive force of the heated included moisture, to
which the viscid half-molten glass readily yields. At the time of
the eruption which produced this dust, subterranean heat was applied
to the moisture-bearing rock until this was superheated to such an
extent that the weight of the overlying material was insufficient to
hold the water from expanding into steam. Then there was a tremendous
explosion, and the molten magma was thrown up with such a force that
it was shattered into minute droplets, in the same way as water does
when it is thrown forcibly into the air. Being thus released from
pressure, the steam inside of each little particle of the heated
glass caused it to swell out into a tiny bubble. As this kept on
expanding it was cooled, the thin glass wall of the bubble congealed,
and finally burst from the pressure of the steam within. This is the
reason why the little dust particles are thin, mostly triangular, and
often slightly concave flakes with sharp angles. Sometimes the angles
appear rounded, as if the fragments had been viscid enough to creep a
little after the bubble burst. The study of one single little grain
of dust, barely visible to the naked eye, thus makes clear the nature
of a catastrophe which must have shaken a whole mountain, and which
left its traces over a quarter of a continent.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--A PARTICLE OF VOLCANIC ASH SWELLED UP BY
FUSION. Magnified 100 diameters.]
That the dust was produced in this way is quite evident from other
circumstances. If a handful from the dust of this place be thrown
into water and gently stirred, it nearly all will settle after
a while. But some rather large particles remain floating on the
surface. If these are removed and examined under the microscope, they
are seen to be hollow spheres (Fig. 2, _b_). These are some of the
original bubbles that never burst, either because they contained too
little steam or else because the steam was cooled before it had time
to break the walls open. It is evident that not every droplet of the
molten magma would form a single sphere, but that many also would
swell up into a compound frothlike mass of pumice. A few such pieces
may sometimes be observed in the deposit at this place, and that many
more were made and broken is evident from the great number of glass
fragments which have riblike edges on their flat sides (Fig. 3, _a_).
The nature of the force which caused the eruption may thus be
understood from the study of one little grain of the dust, but much
more extended observations are needed in order to make out the place
where the great convulsion took place. It will, perhaps, never be
known what particular volcanic vent was the source of this ash.
Different deposits may have come from different places. But it seems
possible that it all came from the same eruption. There can be no
doubt that the volcanic disturbances occurred to the west of the
Great Plains. No recent extinct volcanoes are found in any other
direction. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that the
dust is finer in eastern localities and coarser nearer the Rocky
Mountains. In a bed near Golden, in Colorado, seventy-three per cent,
by weight, of the dust consists of particles measuring from one
fourth to one thirty-second of a millimetre, while some from Orleans,
in Nebraska, contains seventy-four per cent of particles measuring
from one sixteenth to one sixty-fourth of a millimetre in diameter.
Still finer material comes from the bluffs of the Missouri River near
Omaha. Evidently the coarser particles would settle first, and if
the dust is finer toward the east, it must be because the wind which
brought it blew from the west. Most likely the eruption occurred
somewhere in Colorado or in New Mexico.
It may be asked how it can be known that the dust was carried this
long distance by the wind. May it not as well have been transported
by water? The answer must be, in the first place, that showers of
the same kind of material have been observed in connection with
volcanic outbursts in other parts of the world. One such shower is
known to have strewn the same kind of dust on the snow in Norway
after a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and after the great explosion
on Krakatoa, in 1883, such dust was carried by the wind several
hundred miles, and scattered over the ocean. If this ash had been
transported by water, it would not be found in such a pure state, but
it would be mixed with other sediments. There would, no doubt, also
be found coarser fragments of the volcanic products. On the contrary,
it appears uniformly fine. No particles have been found which
measure more than one millimetre in diameter, and less than one per
cent of its weight consists of particles exceeding one eighth of a
millimetre in diameter. In seven samples taken from different places
the proportions of the different sizes of the grains were about as
follows:
A = Diameter of grains in millimetres
B = Percentage of weight of each size
---+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------+----------+-----------
A |1/2-1/4|1/4-1/8|1/8-1/16|1/16-1/32|1/32-1/64|1/64-1/128|1/128-1/256
B | 0.1 | 0.1 | 19 | 37 | 32 | 9 | 1
---+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------+----------+-----------
Flaky particles of this size are easily carried along by a moderate
wind. In some places it appears as if the dust were resting on an
old land surface where no water could have been standing when it
fell. There is really no room for doubt that it was carried several
hundred miles by the wind. It must have darkened the sky at the time,
and it must have settled slowly and quietly over the wide plains,
covering extensive tracts with a white, snowlike mantle several feet
in thickness. What a desolate landscape after such a shower! What a
calamity for the brute inhabitants of the land!
Right here in McPherson County there was either a river or a lake at
the time of the catastrophe. This is plainly indicated in several
ways. In one place the dust rests on sand and clay, with imbedded
shells of fresh-water clams. It is assorted in coarse and fine layers
like a water sediment. Lowermost is a seam of very coarse grains.
These must have settled promptly through the water, while the finer
material was delayed. In another place it lies on higher ground,
and here marks of sedges and other vegetation are seen extending up
about a foot into the base of the deposit, from an underlying mucky
clay. Bog manganese impregnates a thin layer just above the clay,
indicating a marshy condition. Here also the material is somewhat
sorted, but in a different way. It is ripple-bedded. The water was
evidently shallow, if there was any water at all. A burrow like that
of a crawfish extended down into the old clay bottom. On a slab of
the volcanic ash itself some tracks appeared (Fig. 4). These were
probably made by an individual of the same race in an effort to
escape from the awful fate of being buried alive like the inhabitants
of Herculaneum and Pompeii.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--TRACKS IN THE VOLCANIC DUST, PROBABLY MADE BY
A CRAWFISH. Reduced to 2/8 diameter.]
The shower must have lasted for a time of two or three days. I infer
this from the nature of the wind changes, which are indicated by the
ripples in the dust. These still lie in perfect preservation (Fig.
5), and may be studied by removing, inch by inch, the successive
layers from above downward, for it is evident that as the direction
of the wind changed, the ripples were also turned. The deciphering of
this record must be made backward. The bottom layers were deposited
first, and the excavation must begin on top. Otherwise the record is
as perfect as if it had been taken down by an instrument when the
shower occurred. It may be only local in its significance, for it
shows the direction of the wind at this particular place alone. The
wind may have been somewhat deflected from the general direction by
local topographic peculiarities, though these appear to have been of
small importance. In any case, the old legend is quite interesting to
read, being, I believe, the only geological record ever found of the
passing of a cyclone over the United States.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--RIPPLE MARKS IN THE VOLCANIC DUST. Reduced to
1/4 diameter.]
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--PECULIAR ELEVATIONS CAUSED BY A CURRENT FROM
THE SOUTHWEST TO THE NORTHEAST. Reduced to 1/2 diameter.]