ABOUT THE WEDDING-RING. 73 



conciliate tbeir brides and be in the fashion. The revulsion made the 

 ring what we now have, a plain gold circlet ; though, by a compro- 

 mise, the engagement-ring may be as costly as fancy dictates or means 

 permit. 



The materials of which wedding-rings have been composed are as 

 diverse as the nations which have used the ring. The British Museum 

 has rings of bone and of hard wood, found in the Swiss lakes ; on one 

 of the bone rings is traced a heart, giving antiquaries reason to be- 

 lieve that the ring was a pledge of affection, if not a wedding-ring. 

 The same museum has rings from all parts of the earth — of bone, ivory, 

 copper, brass, lead, tin, iron, silver, gold, and some of a composite of 

 several of these metals. One ivory ring, from an Egyptian tomb, 

 bears two clasped hands ; an iron ring, having the design of a hand 

 closing over a heart, once graced the hand of a Roman matron ; while 

 the inscriptions on many others make it certain that they were wedding- 

 rings. 



The use of many different materials in the construction of these 

 wedding-rings does not indicate capricious changes of fashion, for it 

 should be remembered that museums and collections of antiquities com- 

 prise specimens of many ages and of widely-separated lands, but there 

 is no doubt that fashion has sometimes had an influence in determin- 

 ing the style and material of the ring. For instance : during the lat- 

 ter part of the sixteenth century a fashion for some time prevailed in 

 France of making the wedding-ring consist of several links fastened to- 

 gether in such a way as to seem but one. Sometimes there were three, 

 two links having graven hands and the third a heart, the union of the 

 three in the proper position clasping the hands over the heart. During 

 the palmy days of astrology, there was quite a fashion in Germany of 

 wedding-rings engraved with astronomical and astrological characters, 

 the horoscopes of both the contracting parties being sometimes indi- 

 cated in the setting of the ring. That being also the golden age of 

 the quack doctor, wedding-rings were often made with a cavity to con- 

 tain medical preparations or charms to preserve or restore health or 

 avert evil. After the Crusades had set Europe in a flame, a practice 

 became common in France, Germany, and England, of wearing rings 

 the setting of which was a tiny fragment of wood from the true cross, 

 and many of these rings ai'e still preserved in the cabinets and museums 

 of Europe. Ass-hoof rings were, in the seventeenth century, very popu- 

 lar among the Spanish peasants as a cure for epilepsy ; and such a ring, 

 made, it was said, from the hoof of the ass which carried Christ into 

 Jerusalem, was used in a wedding in a country church near Madrid in 

 1881! 



But when the ring was not plain, precious stones of some kind 

 constituted the settings ; and when the selection of the stone was in 

 question, the dominance of fashion was absolute. In the fourteenth 

 century, a fanciful Italian writer on the mystic arts set forth the vir- 



