530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



can find them in his satras, reading somewhat after this fashion : " If 

 it is a man that consults you respecting his future, he will be a man- 

 darin; if it is a girl, tell her she will be married before the year 

 is over. If it is a man who wants to marry, he should be told like- 

 wise that he will find a wife within a year. If you are consulted 

 concerning a lawsuit, inform your client that he is protected by a 

 powerful man who will see that he wins it. If a sick man consults 

 you, give him to understand that his illness is not serious, and that it 

 comes from his having offended some power, or from not having 

 fulfilled a promise." All this is not very hard. But the satras 

 containing these revelations and prophecies has lost much of its 

 importance in recent years. It has been stolen, and several copies 

 have found their way into the hands of the sachars, who have 

 very little faith in it. I have, however, seen a literatus consult it 

 seriously, and have heard several persons afiirm that it is infallible. 



This business is innocent trifling, and the prophecies are not of 

 the kind that lead the seers who sell them into the courts. It is not 

 for predicting good fortune that they are sometimes condemned to 

 death, but for real crimes committed under color of sorcery. 



Loup-garous are victims of witches, who cast a spell upon them 

 or cause them to absorb some magical essence. They leave their 

 homes in a state of insanity, fly to the woods, climb trees, or hide 

 in the thickets. They are followed by tigers, who wait till the 

 seventh day, when the hair has grown upon their bodies, and then 

 take them away into the forests to live by hunting. There are 

 stories of women transformed in this way, who have become terrible 

 tigresses, living wholly on human flesh. When a person is afilicted 

 in this way he must be pursued with a pole and struck very hard on 

 the head before the seventh day, the pursuer uttering magical invo- 

 cations. Then he can be taken home well or convalescent. 



It appears from this that Europe has not invented its magic, and 

 that the superstitions which have prevailed there for generations of 

 wizards and witches, ghosts, familiar spirits, loup-garous, love pow- 

 ders and philters, amulets, secret cures, love formulas, magical in- 

 cantations and exorcisms are also to be found in Cambodia. — 

 Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scien- 

 tifique. 



The report of the Clerkenwell Public Library, Loudon, for 1897, repre- 

 sents that scientific works are very largely circulated. Biology, including 

 evolution and methods of scientific research, is a very popular subject, the 

 sixty-eight works on it which the library contains on this topic having 

 been issued twenty-eight hundred times during recent years. In this sub- 

 ject two copies of Darwin's Descent of Man have been issued nearly two 

 hundred times, a record which is exceeded only by the most popular novels. 



