3 i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



oaths, belonging especially to the lower culture ; let us call them 

 " mundane oaths." Now, it is at a point above the savage level in 

 culture that the thought first comes in of the perjurer being punished 

 in a world beyond the grave. This was a conception familiar to the 

 Egyptians in their remotely ancient civilization. It was at home 

 among the old Homeric Greeks, as when Agamemnon, swearing his 

 mighty oaths, calls to witness, not only Father Zeus, and the all-see- 

 ing sun, and the rivers, and earth, but also the Erinnys who down 

 below chastise the souls of the dead, whosoever shall have been for- 

 sworn. Not less plainly is it written in the ancient Hindoo "Laws of 

 Manu " "A man of understanding shall swear no false oath even in a 

 trifling matter, for he who swears a false oath goes hereafter and here 

 to destruction." To this higher stage of culture, then, belongs the 

 introduction of the new "post-mundane" element into oaths. For 

 ages afterward nations might still use either kind, or combine them 

 by adding the penalty after death to that in life. But in the later 

 course of history there comes plainly into view a tendency to subor- 

 dinate the old mundane oath, and at last to suppress it altogether. 

 How this came to pass is plain on the face of the matter. It was 

 simply the result of accumulated experience. The continual compari- 

 son of opinions with facts could not but force observant minds to 

 admit that a man might swear falsely on sword's edge or spear's 

 point, and yet die with a whole skin ; that bears and tigers were not 

 to be depended on to choose perjurers for their victims, and that in 

 fact the correspondence between the imprecation and the event was 

 not real, but only ideal. How judgment by real results thus shaped 

 itself in men's minds we may see by the way it came to public utter- 

 ance in classic times, nowhere put more cogently than in the famous 

 dialogue in the " Clouds " of Aristophanes. The old farmer Strepsi- 

 ades asks, " Whence comes the blazing thunderbolt that Zeus hurls at 

 the perjured ?" " You fool," replies the Socrates of the play, " you 

 smack of old Kronos's times if Zeus smote perjurers, wouldn't he 

 have been down on those awful fellows Simon, and Kleonymos, and 

 Theoros ? Why, what Zeus does with his bolt is to smite his own 

 temple, and the heights of Sunium, and the tall oaks ! Do you mean 

 to say that an oak-tree can commit perjury ?" What is said here in 

 chaff full many a reasonable man in the old days must have said to 

 himself in the soberest earnest, and, once said or thought, but one re- 

 sult could come of it the result which history shows us did come. 

 The venue of the judicial oath was gradually changed, till the later 

 kind, with its penalties transferred from earth to the region of de- 

 parted souls, remained practically in possession of the field. 



As a point in the science of culture, which has hitherto been 

 scarcely if at all observed, I am anxious to call attention to the his- 

 torical stratification of judicial oaths, from the lowest stratum of 

 mundane oaths belonging to savage or barbaric times, to the highest 



