and upon this city?”, and he has the gates shut and guarded when it grows dark before the sabbath. When, notwithstanding this, the merchants once or twice encamped outside the walls on the sabbath, he drove them away with threats[1118]. At this time work was performed and trade carried on on the sabbath, though certainly it does not follow that the sabbath was the principal market-day of the week: we are speaking of a large town, where no doubt there was a market every day. But it would be quite in keeping if in smaller matters the sabbath had once been the proper market-day. The work of Webster culminates in an attempt to explain the sabbath. The author brings together abundant material for the practice of assigning certain taboos to certain days, partly notable days in the experience of human life, such as birth, death, etc., and partly those regularly recurring days which are dependent on superstitious and religious ideas. Among these days are found both the market-day and the days of the principal phases of the moon,--the day of new moon, in a lesser degree the day of full moon, and further also the days of the darkness, of the moon’s invisibility. He rightly distinguishes the continuous Israelitish week from the ‘unlucky days’ of the Babylonians, but is nevertheless of the opinion that the sabbath is really the day of full moon, which in this character was overlaid with certain taboos and has become independent of the moon. How this separation was effected, Webster does not explain: he merely makes the statement. He has not felt the decisive difficulty, which lies just in this point, because he has not attacked the problem from its chronological side. There is no reason to suppose that the day of full moon could become detached from the genuine lunar month, and such a process would seem still more strange since the day of new moon remained a genuine new-moon day. On the other hand the development of market and rest-day into a day of taboo is everywhere natural, and is attested in the above examples from Africa; this taboo character was emphasised and inculcated by the late Jewish and exilian legislation in opposition to the old festive merry-making. The new-moon day, which had fallen out of the scheme, was at the same time rejected and proscribed. The suggestion that the sabbath arose from the market-day is certainly only a hypothesis, since a definite market-day is not demonstrated for Canaan; but it has the advantage of remaining within the limits of primitive time-reckoning, which knows no other continuous periods than the market-weeks. * * * * *