The next class of omens need not consist of phenomena which are absolutely beyond the range of physical law, provided they be sufficiently rare to strike the imagination of observers as marvelous occurrences. For example, an eclipse of the sun may be an omen to savage or very uninstructed people; a comet, being more unusual, will seem ominous to nations standing on a much higher grade of culture. Advancing still higher, extraordinary and inexplicable sights in the heavens or on earth will stand for portents to all but the scientifically minded. An example of the latter class is found in the temporary withering of the Ruminal tree, which had sheltered the infancy of Romulus and Remus 840 years before (Tac. Ann., xiii. 58). At the time at which Tacitus begins his history, there were, he says, prodigies in the sky and on earth, warnings of lightnings and presages of future things (Tac. Hist., i. 3. 2). Popular imagination, besides converting natural, but rare, phenomena into omens, invents others which are altogether supernatural. In the disturbed days of Otho and Vitellius, it was rumored that a form of larger than human dimensions had issued from the shrine of Juno; that a statue of Julius on the Tiberine island had turned round from west to east without any perceptible agency; that an ox in Etruria had spoken; that animals had brought forth strange progeny; and that other alarming exceptions to the laws of nature had been observed (Ibid., i. 86. 1). The supposed contraction of a man's shadow is thought in South Africa to portend his death (R. S. A., pt. i. p. 126). The Irish Banshee is a being who does not belong to any species recognized by science, and who, moreover, is heard to scream only before a death in the family to which she is attached. The ticking sound produced by a small insect in the wooden furniture of a room is termed in Scotland the death-watch, and has the same ominous significance. To one family, a drummer heard to drum outside the castle is significant of death; in another, it may be that a particular ghost, seen by a casual visitor who knows nothing of its meaning, conveys a similar intimation. The birth of great men is often supposed to be marked by extraordinary signs. "At my nativity," says Owen Glendower, "The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets; and at my birth, The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shak'd like a coward." And again:— "The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields. These signs have marked me extraordinary; And all the courses of my life do show I am not in the roll of common men."[6]