Ja.v. 26, 1883.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



51 



busk. But for my one month of folly I had to endure 

 three months of discomfort. At the end of about that 

 time I was my own man again. 



I hoped that reasoning, without evidence from my own 

 experience, would have sufficed ; but rather than any 

 reader of Knowledce should be deluded into experiments 

 which I know he would repent, I have told the story of my 

 own stupidity. " 1 will rail " in this matter "against no 

 breather than myself, against whom I know most faults." 



But I have another little tale, somewhat pleasanter, to 

 tell, and as likely to be instructive. It is told, " with 

 permission " : — 



An American lady in my own family circle has through- 

 out girlhood and to the present time worn corsets, but not 

 tightly-laced ones. Her waist measurement as a girl — 

 perhaps to the age of eighteen or so — was 19 inches, which 

 she did not (nor does any American lady) consider ' im- 

 mense.' But it should be noted that not only are American 

 girls (of families long resident there) of slighter build on 

 the average than English ones, but there is a tendency 

 in America, not exactly to leanness, but certainly 

 to an absence of any redundancy of adipose tissue. 

 (I have never visited America without losing full 

 30 lb. in weight in the first four or five months ; and 

 in 1875-76 my weight was diminished from 14st. 31b. 

 to 11 st 101b. without any use of anti-corpulence diet or 

 regimen.) This lady, who has resided now some eighteen 

 months in England, has added some 20 lb. to her weight ; 

 but would still be regarded as slight and small-waisted, — 

 except, perhaps, by that army-surgeon, with 23-inch stays 

 and unusually wide shoulders (how^ pretty he must look !) ; 

 for with wide, but not unusually wide, shoulders, her waist- 

 measurement is about the same as the stays-measurement 

 (a very difterent thing) of that medico-military-monstrosity. 

 To make the evidence complete, it should perhaps be 

 added that the lady married eight years since, is still 

 several years on the Vietter side of thirty, and that her 

 fourth child is now a bouncing boy of eleven months. 



It so befell that at Christmas time this lady was very 

 busily engaged in certain house decorations. She found 

 tlie bones of her corset (steels, I suppose they should be 

 called) very much in the way, even after — in stooping, 

 bending, reaching for nails, and so forth — she had succeeded 

 in breaking every one of them. It occurred to her that 

 after all it was very doubtful whether the corset could be 

 of much use, any way, since it had always been perfectly 

 loose. She therefore discarded it. (No, gentle reader, 

 not at my suggestion in any way whatever ; except that 

 as a reader of Kxowledc;e this lady had, no doubt, followed 

 the discussion in these pages.) The result certainly did 

 not suggest that the wearing of loose stays has any 

 beneficial effect, whatever good may (according to 

 " An Observer ") result from a compression of 

 7 or 8 in. For the result was simply a marked 

 increase of comfort (due care having been taken to supply 

 the necessary protection against cold). No one would 

 have known that any change whatever had been made, 

 except for a somewhat greater pliancy of figure. Had she 

 been a tight-lacer before, this last change might have been 

 more marked ; but in that case' I know the corset must 

 soon have been worn again, unless she had been willing to 

 endure great discomfort for a while. I must, in fairness, 

 admit that she recognised one disadvantage — I might, 

 perhaps, say two. Dresses carefully fitted to her corset no 

 longer fitted or hung quite so well (though I doubt if any 

 male eye could have detected the change). This, however, 

 is precisely what the Rational Dress Society has pointed 

 out as sure to follow if heavy skirts are worn without some 

 supporting cincture. 



THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF 

 MYTH. 



By Edward Clodd. 



IN selecting illustrations from the literature of savage 

 mythology, the material overburdens us by its rich- 

 ness. JIuch of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps in our 

 mining districts, once cast aside as rubbish, but now made 

 to yield products of value, it has, after long neglect, been 

 found to contain elements of worth, which patience and 

 insight have extracted from its travellers' tales and quaint 

 speculations. That for which it was most prized in the 

 days of our fathers is now of small account ; that within 

 it which they passed by we secure as of lasting worth. 

 Much of that literature is, however, new, for the impetus 

 which has in our time been given to the rescue and pre- 

 servation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of 

 accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of 

 relics, whicli in the lands of their discovery have still the 

 authority of the past, unimpaired by the critical exposure 

 of tlie present 



The subject itself is, moreover, so wide-reaching, bringing 

 the ancient and the modern into hitherto unsuspected rela- 

 tion, showing how in customs and beliefs, to us unmeaning 

 and irrational, there lurk the degraded representations of 

 old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque, the 

 survivals of man's most serious thought. 



One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to 

 digress in treating of that confusion inherent in the savage 

 mind between things living and not living, which was the 

 main subject of my former paper. By numberless illus- 

 trations at hand, this confusion might be shown to extend 

 to the names or images of persons, and to the persons 

 themselves, as well as to other relations which are purely 

 symbolical. 



For example, the practice of liurning or hanging in 

 effigy, by which a crowd expresses its feelings towards 

 any unpopular person, is a relic of the old belief in a 

 real and sympathetic connection between a man and his 

 image ; a belief extant among the unlettered in by-places 

 of ci\dlised countries. When we hear of North American 

 tribes making images of their foes, whose li\es they 

 expect to shorten by piercing these images with their arrows, 

 we remember that these barbarous folk have their repre- 

 sentatives among us in the Devonshire peasant, who hangs 

 in his chimney a pig's heart stuck all over with thorn- 

 prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be 

 pierced. The practice among the Dyaks of Borneo, of 

 making a wax figure of the foe, so that his body may 

 waste away as the wax is melted, will remind the admirers 

 of Dante Rossetti how he finds in a kindred mediteval su- 

 perstition the subject of his poem " Sister Helen," while 

 they who prefer the authority of sober prose may turn to 

 that storehouse of the curious, Brand's "Popular Anti- 

 quities." Brand quotes from King James, who, in his 

 " D;emonology," book ii. chaji. f:i, tells us that " the devil 

 teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that 

 by roasting thereof th(^ persons that they bear the 

 name of may be continually melted or dried away by 

 continual sickness ; " and also cites Andrews, the author 

 of a " Continuation of Henry's Great Britain," who, 

 speaking of the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby, by 

 poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says : " The credulity of 

 the age attributed his death to witchcraft. The disease 

 was odd, and operated as a perpetual emetic ; and a waxen 

 image, with hair like that of the unfortunate earl, found 

 in his chamber, reduced every suspicion to certainty." The 

 passage from practices born of such beliefs to the use of 



