SEASONAL PREDICTIONS. 243 



the rankest weeds, is always that from which culture 

 may obtain the most valuable crop. If ignorance or 

 cunning fix a superstition upon any thing, there must 

 be something attractive about it, and therefore some 

 professional naturalist, who had the requisite informa- 

 tion and leisure, could not render a greater service to 

 society than by drawing up a " Philosophy of Popular 

 Superstitions," as connected with the seasons and their 

 productions, and disentangling the facts from the 

 fables, which would be at once eradicating the evil, 

 and eliminating the good. 



Take, as a familiar instance, the sun and the moon. 

 No rational person now ever thinks of inquiring when 

 the latter luminary is 



" In the fittest mood 

 For cutting corns, or letting blood ;" 



and no body supposes that the sign which the sun is 

 in, that is the particular point of the heavens, or the 

 cluster of stars which are seen at that point, when, at 

 another season, the sun is absent and they appear, has 

 any influence upon man, or any thing else. Yet both 

 the sun and the moon have an influence upon every 

 thing connected with the earth, and with the health, 

 and even the mental state of man, among the rest; 

 and that influence deserves to be much more carefully 

 studied than it is, being, in fact, the very foundation 

 of the philosophy of life. The spring puts one very 

 forcibly in mind of it. The rapid change of tempera- 

 ture ; the daily fluctuations, occasioned by the great 

 difference between the presence of the sun and its 

 absence ; the equal number of hours into which the 



