BETWEEN INDIAN AND JEWISH IDEAS AND CUSTOMS. 101 
noble, told me that he refused to give a younger sister to a 
son-in-law, who had already been long married to the elder, on 
the ground that the latter should not be vexed. The specious 
reason, which had been given in similar cases, that the two 
sisters would comfort each other in a foreign country had no 
weight with him. 
The Jewish ideas of defilement in connection with the dead 
are fully shared by all Hindus, as the following incident will 
prove. 
It was necessary to put up a special notice in the Jeypore 
Museum warning those who had strict views on this subject,, 
not to touch even the outside of the closed case in which there 
was an Egyptian mummy, lest they should think they were 
defiled. I have known a case in which, after seeing a mummy 
at the end of a long corridor, the spectator went home and 
washed. 
The illustrations which I have been able to give to-day may 
make us thankful that we are free from many of the 
obligations which weigh so heavily upon our Indian friends, 
and with which the nations of antiquity were so grievously 
burdened. 
Discussion. 
Lieut.-Colonel G. Mackinlay. — I beg to move a vote of thanks 
to Colonel Holbein Hendley for his interesting paper, the part on 
Indian jewellery being excellent. 
Deferring to the paper before us, second half of page 80. The 
pivot and socket arrangement seems to he referred to in Prov. xxvi, 
14, “ As the door turneth upon its hinges, so doth the slothful upon 
his bed.” I have lived for a few days in a wooden house in 
Gulmurg in Cashmere, which had small folding doors, each made of 
a slab of wood (the width of a tree) with projecting pivots, all in 
one piece ; these worked in wooden sockets. The plan had 
probably been employed because metal was evidently scarce when 
the house was built, it was doubtless the same as that adopted in 
the very ancient small wooden doors from which afterwards the 
gates of Babylon with their metal pivots and sockets must have 
been evolved. 
