SUPERSTITION AND CRIME. 217 



danger of detection is also forestalled by laying a dead man's hand 

 on a window sill; and in order to make assurance doubly sure, both 

 preservatives are usually employed. Hence the proverbial saying, 

 " He sleeps as though a dead hand had been carried round him." The 

 desire to procure material for such candles often leads to the commis- 

 sion of crime. An Austrian jurist, Dr. Gross, in his manual for in- 

 quisitorial judges (Handbuch filr Untersuchungsrichter), and the 

 folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin, give numerous instances of this 

 kind, and there is no doubt that the many mysterious murders and 

 ghastly mutilations, especially of women and children, so horrifying 

 to the public and puzzling to the police, are due to the same cause. 

 In most cases the prosecuting attorneys and judges are unable to dis- 

 cover the read motives of such bloody and brutal deeds because they 

 are ignorant of the popular superstitions in which they have their 

 origin, and, for lack of any better explanation, attribute them to 

 mere brutishness, wantonness, homicidal mania, and other vague and 

 unintelligible impulses, whereas in reality they spring from a su- 

 premely selfish but exceedingly definite purpose, are perpetrated de- 

 liberately, and with the normal exercise of the mental faculties, and 

 can not be mitigated even by the extenuating plea of sudden passion. 

 Crimes of this sort are of common occurrence not only in the semi- 

 barbarous provinces of Russia, but also in Austria and Germany, 

 justly reckoned among the most civilized countries of Christendom. 

 On January 1, 1865, the house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in 

 West Prussia, was entered during the absence of the family by a 

 burglar, Gottfried Dallian, who killed the maid-servant, Catharina 

 Zernickel, and ransacked the premises in search of money and other 

 objects of value. Before carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece 

 of flesh out of the body of the murdered girl in order to make candles 

 for his protection on future occasions of this sort. The talismanic 

 light, which he kept in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being 

 caught in the act of committing another burglary about six weeks 

 later. During the trial, which resulted in his condemnation to death, 

 he confessed that he had eaten some of the maid-servant's flesh in 

 order to appease his conscience. This disgusting method of alleviat- 

 ing the " compunctious visitings of Nature " would seem to confirm 

 the suggestion of a writer in the Russkiya Wjedomosti (Russian 

 News, 1888, ]STo. 359) that the thieves' candle is a survival of primi- 

 tive cannibalism, distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Rus- 

 sian folk song which runs as follows : " I bake a cake out of the 

 hands and feet, out of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the 

 eyes I cast drinking glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating 

 beer, and out of the fat I mold a candle." It is certainly very queer 

 to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the 



TOL. LIT. — 16 



