458 FALLACIES. 



added an auxiliary fallacy of mal-observation, with one of false genera- 

 lization grounded upon it. Fallacies of different orders often herd or 

 cluster together in this fashion. But the origin of the superstition is 

 evidently that which we have assigned. In like manner it has been 

 universally considered unlucky to speak of misfortune. The day on 

 which any calamity happened has been considered an unfortunate day, 

 and there has been a feeling everywhere, and in some nations a 

 religious obligation, against transacting any important business on 

 that day. For on such a day our thoughts are likely to be of misfor- 

 tune. For a similar reason, any untoward occurrence in commencing 

 an undertaking has been considered ominous of failure ; and often, 

 doubtless, has really contributed to it, by putting the persons engaged 

 in the enterprise more or less out of spirits : but the belief has etjually 

 prevailed where the disagi-eeable circumstance was, independently of 

 superstition, too insignificant to depress the spirits by any influence of 

 its own. All know the story of Caesar's accidentally stumbling in the 

 act of landing on the African coast ; and the presence of mind with 

 which he converted the direful presage into a favorable one by ex- 

 claiming, "Africa, I embrace thee !" Such omens, it is true, were of- 

 ten conceived as warnings of the future, given by a friendly or a hostile 

 deity : but this very superstition grew out of a preexisting tendency ; 

 the god was supposed to send, as an indication of what was to come, 

 something which men were already inclined to consider in that light. 

 So in the case of lucky or unlucky names. Herodotus tells how the 

 Greeks, on the way to Mycale, were encouraged in their enterprise by 

 the arrival of a deputation from Samos, one of the members of which 

 was named Hegesistratus, the leader of armies. 



Cases may be pointed out in which something which could have no 

 real effect but to make pei-sons think of misfortune, was regarded not 

 merely as a prognostic but as something approaching to an actual 

 cause of it. The kv<^i]\iEi of the G reeks, and favete Unguis, or bona 

 verba quceso, of the Romans, evince the care with which they endeav- 

 ored 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 

 bona 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 calamity : how instead oi mortuus est they said vixit ; 

 and "be the event fortunate or otherwise" instead of a Jrer^e. The 

 name Maleventum, of which Salmasius so sagaciously detected the 

 Thessalian origin (MaAoei^, yiakoevToc;), they changed into the highly 

 propitious denomination, Beneventum ; and Epidamnus, a name so 

 pleasant in its associations to the reader of Thucydides, they ex- 

 changed for Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive 

 of damnum or detriment. 



" If a hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas Browne,* " there 

 are few above threescore that are not perplexed thereat; which not- 



* Vulgar Errors, book v., hap. 21. 



