168 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



singular poverty of imagination, and would be rather monoto- 

 nous and unedifying reading. 



The principal signs of demoniacal possession, as given in eccle- 

 siastical and most fully in monastic rituals, are the ability to 

 speak or to understand foreign tongues unknown to the possessed, 

 to tell where objects are hidden (like a mind-reader), the exhibi- 

 tion of supernatural bodily strength, intense aversion to holy 

 places and to consecrated objects and persons, and the power of 

 moving through space in defiance of the laws of gravitation. 



A boy, who showed all these symptoms, was brought to Parson 

 Kneipp, a Catholic priest, who has a much-frequented hydropathic 

 establishment in Bavaria. Two priests had already declared the 

 boy to be possessed, and had tried to exorcise him, but without 

 effect. Parson Kneipp, who had learned to look upon phenomena 

 with medical rather than with theological eyes, took a rational 

 view of the case, and by a sytematic water-cure treatment healed 

 the patient in six weeks. 



It is true that the devil has been eliminated from the passion 

 play at Oberammergau, in which he once took a prominent part, 

 and amused the public by his clownish tricks. This change 

 has been cited in proof of the progress of enlightenment among 

 the peasants of the Bavarian highlands. No inference could be 

 more incorrect. The devil disappeared from the stage, much 

 against the will of the Oberammergauers, in 1810, by command of 

 the Bavarian Government, which refused to permit a further 

 representation of the play except on this condition. The text was 

 then thoroughly revised and the performance remodeled by Dr. 

 Ottmar Weiss, and Satan utterly banished from the scenes. The 

 mass of the peasantry, nevertheless, believe in the devil and the 

 reality of diabolic interference in human affairs as firmly as 

 ever. 



Modern science is doubtless doing a great work in dimin- 

 ishing the realm of superstition ; but there are vast low-lying 

 plains of humanity that have not yet felt its beneficent influence. 

 " The schoolmaster is abroad " ; but where he wears the cassock 

 or the cowl, or is placed under strict clerical supervision, as the 

 recent Prussian Education Bill proposed to do, the progress of 

 intelligence in the direction indicated will be exceeding slow. 



Me. 0. W. Kempton remarks, in Science, that on a study of Schiaparelli's chart 

 of Mars the systems of " canals" resolve themselves, in many cases, into groups of 

 six, making hexagons, and giving the idea that the planet may be solidified into a 

 mass, with tendency to hexagonal crystallization — the canals, for instance, being 

 fissures on the lines of the angles of crystallization. This would account for many 

 of the peculiarities of their appearance, while in no way opposing the present 

 existence of atmosphere, water, snow, ice, and vegetation on the planet. 



