FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 353 



which could have no real effect but to make persons 

 think of misfortune, was regarded not merely as a 

 prognostic but as something approaching to an actual 

 cause of it. The evffifiei, of the Greeks, and favete 

 linguis, or bona verba qu&so, of the Romans, evince the 

 care with which they endeavoured to repress the 

 utterance of any word expressive or suggestive of ill 

 fortune; not from notions of delicate politeness, to 

 which their general mode of conduct and feeling had 

 very little reference, but from bond fide alarm lest the 

 event so suggested to the imagination should in fact 

 occur. Some vestige of a similar superstition has 

 been known to exist among uneducated persons even 

 in our own day: it is thought an unchristian thing to 

 talk of, or suppose, the death of any person while he 

 is alive. It is known how careful the Romans were 

 to avoid, by an indirect mode of speech, the utterance 

 of any word directly expressive of death or other cala- 

 mity: how instead of mortuus est they said vixit; 

 and u be the event fortunate or otherwise" instead of 

 adverse. The name Maleventum, of which Salmasius 

 so sagaciously detected the Thessalian origin (Makoeis, 

 MaXoej/ro9), they changed into the highly propitious 

 denomination, Beneventum; and Epidamnus, a name 

 so pleasant in its associations to the reader of Thucy- 

 dides, they exchanged for Dyrrhachium, to escape the 

 perils of a word suggestive of damnum or detriment. 



" If an hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas 

 Browne*, " there are few above threescore that are 

 not perplexed thereat ; which notwithstanding is but 

 an augurial terror, according to that received expres- 

 sion, Inauspicatum dat iter oblatus lepus. And the 

 ground of the conceit was probably no greater than 



' Vulgar Errors^ book v., chap. 21. 

 VOL. II. 2 A 



