An instance of oaths being subjected to the like whimsical conditions is noticeable in the domestic manners of Old Germany. We gather from the popular mediaeval satire, the 'Ship of Fools,' that a code of rules had been formulated regulating the propriety of swearing. Society in this case would seem to have formed its precedents of oath-taking, and to have withheld its sanction from any others than its own. There was a time in Germany it appears when a man adopted an oath as deliberately as he might take to a trade, it being only necessary, to bring it within the licensed pale, that it should be derived from the symbols of his own or his father's occupation. The particular merit of this system was that while it partook of all the abandonment and conferred all the enjoyment of swearing, it was practically no swearing at all. When, in an outburst of passion, the grazier called out upon his beeves, or the smith invoked his anvil or his sledge, all the advantages of swearing, whatever they may be held to be, had been accomplished, and that without prudery being ruffled or innocence shocked. In fact the needs of society had invented a kind of stalking-horse for blasphemy, and the Bob Acreses and Captain Absolutes of that day must have found themselves cruelly hoodwinked by the inanimate effigy of swearing. But while northern nations were conspicuous for the substantial and ponderous nature of their oaths, the Roman yielded to none in the multiform versatility of his adjurations. Caligula owned a horse that he not only treated as a fellow-being and brought to meals at his table, but whose name served him wherewith to pronounce his accustomed oaths. The same emperor is reported to have put to death a Roman citizen who refused to swear by his "imperial genius." Another of the oaths prescribed by command of Caligula was "per numen Drusillae." This wretched woman he constrained his subjects to worship as a divinity. To explain this partiality for the use of these absurd if not impious oaths, it would seem that a tradition had been circulated, ascribing the duration of his own lifetime to the period during which the oath should pass current. Any attack of illness that happened to the emperor was directly attributed to the waning popularity of the oath. Nor was the doctrine strange to many of the nationalities over which the Roman sway extended. We have it distinctly occurring among the Scythians,[21] and it has more recently been noticed by travellers as existing among half-barbarous tribes. The oath itself was probably a development of the affirmation that has been used more than any other in the history of the world. The _life_ or the _head_ of the ruler of the chief tribesman, or of the spiritual prophet, has invariably furnished the true standard of affirmation. But even as a mere domestic oath, the _head_ of the goodman of the house seems to have been permitted a degree of solemnity--