POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



717 



that a very little patience, and a very little 

 practice, would soon make most men give 

 up their dread of thinking, and would make 

 an hour spent without books or talk a pleas- 

 ure instead of a pain. No doubt this is not 

 true of all men. There are certain persons 

 cursed with a constitutional melancholy so 

 deep that it is impossible for them to think 

 cheerfully. . . . These, however, are the ab- 

 normal cases. The ordinary man at ordi- 

 nary times has no real reason for dreading his 

 thoughts. It is merely want of habit that 

 makes him dislike thinking. Let him make 

 the plunge, and select something definite to 

 think about, and ten to one he will find fol- 

 lowing a train of thought a very agreeable 

 exercise. Letting the mind veer backward 

 and forward like a weathercock, at the sug- 

 gestion of this or that external circum- 

 stance, is, of course, dull and worrying ; but 

 the man who knows how to think does not 

 do that. He thinks, as he reads, with a defi- 

 nite purpose." The writer concludes by ob- 

 serving that " the man who trains his men- 

 tal powers by meditation and by following 

 out lines of thought, obtains an intellectual 

 instrument a hundred times more powerful 

 than he who is content never to think seri- 

 ously and consecutively. The things one 

 merely reads about never stick. Those on 

 which one thinks become permanent acqui- 

 sitions. Hence, the man who is never afraid 

 of thinking, and who does not dread ' that 

 cursed hour in the dark,' is at a distinct ad- 

 vantage on every ground. He passes the 

 time without being bored, and he strengthens 

 his mind. . . . The man who can enjoy and 

 make use of his own thoughts has a heritage 

 which can never be alienated. Even blind- 

 ness for him loses some of its terrors." 



The World's Mineral Industries. — The 



reviews of the mineral industry, published 

 yearly in a statistical supplement of the En- 

 gineering and Mining Journal, have been 

 rising every year to increased value and im- 

 portance. The publishers of the journal 

 have decided to issue those for the last year 

 in a large octavo volume, under the title of 

 the Mineral Industry, its Statistics, Technolo- 

 gy, and Trade, both in the United States and 

 Foreign Countries, from the Earliest Times 

 to the Close of 1892. It will treat the sub- 

 stances which are the objects of mining for 



profit, from scientific, technological, and eco- 

 nomical points of view, describing the modes 

 of occurrence of the minerals, their exploita- 

 tion and preparation for the market, and the 

 statistics of the trade in them. 



The Material of Folk Lore. — Mr. George 

 Laurence Gomme maintains, in his Ethnology 

 in Folk Lore, that the constituent elements of 

 folk lore — consisting as they do of beliefs, 

 customs, and traditions that are far behind 

 civilization in their intrinsic value to man, 

 though they exist under cover of a civilized 

 nationality — must in general be traceable to 

 the survival of a condition of human thought 

 more backward, and therefore more ancient, 

 than that in which they are discovered, and 

 which may, therefore, conveniently be called 

 with reference to it a condition of unciviliza- 

 tion. It follows that, as an element of un- 

 civilization, existing side by side with civili- 

 zation, its development must have been ar- 

 rested at the point where the civilization 

 began. It may have experienced modifica- 

 tion, and, indeed, in most cases has been 

 largely modified ; but that modification has 

 tended rather to its extinction than to its de- 

 velopment upon the lines upon which it was 

 proceeding at the time the arrestment took 

 place. Ascertain the point of arrestment, 

 which may in general be expected to coincide 

 with the appearance on the scene of a race 

 of people to whom the belief or custom or 

 tradition is strange or unknown, and you 

 may reasonably attribute it to the pre-exist- 

 ing people whom they displaced or subdued. 

 When, therefore, savage or rude customs are 

 stated to have existed in Rome or Greece, 

 or the German or Celtic countries of modern 

 Europe, it is not to be assumed, as it has 

 hitherto been, that they are of Roman, Greek, 

 German, or Celtic origin ; but it is to be as- 

 certained whether they embody an idea the 

 development of which was arrested by those 

 civilizations, and if so, they must be referred 

 to an antecedent race of relative unciviliza- 

 tion. Mr. Gomme adduces in support of this 

 conclusion the annual ceremonies connected 

 with the worship of the village goddess in 

 southern India. On this sole occasion in the 

 year it is the outcast pariah, the descendant 

 of the aboriginal race, who is the officiating 

 priest. The goddess is generally adored in 

 the form of an unshapen stone. Bloody ani- 



