We may next be allowed to point out the kinship in superstition which prevails all over the world; so that the observance or custom which seems peculiar to England or Scotland, is found in India or Tartary. This remarkable similarity indicates a certain general tendency to attach an “ominous significance” to particular things and events. Take as an illustration, the act of sneezing. In Asia as well as Europe, among Semitic peoples as well as among Aryan, it is usual to connect with the act some form of blessing. Sometimes the sneezer is blessed by the bystander; sometimes he blesses himself; if a Mohammedan, he blesses GOD. In Italy, for example, the salutation addressed to him runs: “May GOD preserve you!” or “May you have children!” In Hindi it takes the form of “Sadàji’s” (May you live for ever!) and a similar salutation is used by the Jews of Austria. But in different places and at different times sneezing has been made to carry a very different meaning. Among the Arabs, if, while a person is making an assertion which some may think hazardous or dubious, another sneezes, the speaker appeals to the omen as a confirmation of what he is saying. A writer in the “Calcutta Review” thinks this notion as old as the Greeks of the time of Xenophon, as appears from a well known passage in Chap. ii. Book iii. of the Anabasis: Ἐπεὶ περί σωτηρὶας ἡμῶν λεγόντον οἰωνὸς τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ σωτῆρος ἐφάνη. Sneezing among the Hindus, if it occur behind your back, is regarded as so unfavourable an omen, that they at once abandon the work on which at the time they may have been engaged. Various but not satisfactory attempts have been made to explain these customs. Thus, the Mohammedan accounts for his “Al hamdu-l Allah” by the tradition that, when the breath of life was breathed into the nostrils of Adam, he sneezed, and immediately uttered those words. While in Europe the custom of blessing the sneezer has been traced to the occurrence in Italy in the middle ages of some fatal epidemic, of which one of the symptoms was sneezing. The superstition which regards as a favourable omen the throbbing of the eye, was well known to the ancient Greeks, is common in England, and flourishes all over India. In England, it is the man’s right eye and the woman’s left that is auspicious; and so it was in the Greece of Theocritus, and so it is in India and Persia.