416 Scientific Intelligence. — Anthropology. 



the English. Again, among the ancients the value of forms in 

 encouraging feelings of devotion or respect, seems to have been 

 fully understood, and certain postures were accordingly scrupu- 

 lously enforced in the ceremonies of religious worship, or in the 

 respects paid to kings and princes. Hence the different values 

 attached in different parts of the world to prostrations and 

 genuflexions, when a subject approaches his sovereign ; matters 

 which the unthinking regard as mere idle ceremonies, but which 

 the physiologist must consider as founded on the fact, that these 

 positions do actually increase the awe felt on such occasions. 

 The priests and priestesses most celebrated among the ancients 

 never thought themselves inspired, never ventured to utter 

 oracles, even at Delphi, until they had worked themselves into 

 a frenzy, by a quick succession of forced attitudes and grimaces. 

 In Grand Cairo, at the public festival of the Mohhaaram, and 

 others kept periodically, the whole population of Cairo, says Mr 

 Lane, is on the move, when the crowding, jostling, and push- 

 ing in the narrow streets and in the mosques is quite intolerable- 

 " At these times the convolving and dancing dervises are per- 

 forming their tricks over every part of the town, blasphemously 

 bawling out the name of God, and asking charity in the terms 

 of the Koran." Mr Lane says, " that each seemed to be per- 

 forming the antics of a madman ; now moving his body up and 

 down, the next moment turning round ; then using odd gesticu- 

 lations with his arms, next jumping, and sometimes screaming ; 

 in short, if a stranger observing them were not told that they 

 were performing a religious exercise, supposed to be the invo- 

 luntary effect of enthusiastic excitement, he would certainly 

 think that these dancing dervises were merely striving to excel 

 each other in playing the buffoon." We cannot agree with Mr 

 Lane in this opinion, and have no doubt that the motions of the 

 frantic dervises, properly analyzed, would be found essentially 

 different from those of a buffoon. Thus, says the writer of an 

 article in the Quarterly Review, they dance and whirl till they 

 become as crazy as our own Irvingites with their gibberish 

 bowlings in an urknown tongue ; but the feat performed by one 

 of these enthusiasts is so surprising that we must transcribe it. 

 " In the middle of the ring was placed a small chafing dish of 

 j^inned cop[)er, full of red hot charcoal ; from this the dervise 



