The subject here discussed has not only a speculative interest for ethnographers and students of folklore, but also, as already indicated, a practical importance for criminal lawyers and courts of justice in the Old World and even in the United States. The tide of immigration that has recently set in from the east and south of Europe has brought to our shores an immense number of persons strongly infected with the delusions which we have attempted to describe. Acts which would seem at first sight to have their origin in impulses of cruelty and brutality are found on closer investigation to be due to crass ignorance and credulity, and, although the ultimate motives are usually utterly selfish, there are rare instances in which the perpetrators of such deeds are thoroughly disinterested and altruistic, and do the most revolting things, not from greed of gain, but solely for the public good. In cases of this kind the most effective preventive of wrongdoing is not judicial punishment but intellectual enlightenment. FOOTNOTES: [26] Löwenstimm's studies, printed originally in the Journal of the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg, have been made accessible to a larger class of readers by being collected and translated into German in a volume entitled Aberglaube und Strafrecht (Berlin: Räde, 1897), with an introduction by Prof. Joseph Kohler, of the University of Berlin. [27] As the Siberian Railway approached the northern boundaries of the Chinese Empire and surveys were made for its extension through Manchuria to the sea, great excitement was produced in Pekin by the rumor that the Russian minister had applied to the Empress of China for two thousand children to be buried in the roadbed under the rails in order to strengthen it. Some years ago, in rebuilding a large bridge, which had been swept away several times by inundations in the Yarkand, eight children, purchased from poor people at a high price, were immured alive in the foundations. As the new bridge was firmly constructed out of excellent materials, it has hitherto withstood the force of the strongest floods, a result which the Chinese attribute, not to the solid masonry, but to the propitiation of the river god by an offering of infants. [28] See the case of Bridget Cleary, reported in Appletons' Popular Science Monthly for November, 1895, p. 86. We may add that her husband, Michael Cleary, was tried for murder and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. [29] General Code, vol. xiii, edition of 1892, cited by Löwenstimm. [30] A full account of the trial is given in a Latin manuscript preserved in the city archives of Nantes. A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE. BY J. A. UDDEN.