“The Bedawi, who eructates as a matter of civility, has a mortal hatred to a crepitus ventris; and were a by-stander to laugh at its accidental occurrence, he would be at once cut down as a ‘pundonor.’ The same is the custom among the Highlanders of Afghanistan. And its artificial nature suggests direct derivation; for the two regions are separated by a host of tribes, Persians and Beloch, who utterly ignore the pundoner and behave like Europeans. The raids of the pre-Ishmaelitish Arabs over the lands lying to the northeast of them are almost forgotten; still, there are traces, and this may be one of them.”—(Burton, “Arabian Nights,” vol. v. p. 137.) According to Niebuhr, the voiding of wind is considered to be the gravest indecency among the Arabs; some tribes make a perpetual butt of the offender once guilty of such an infraction of decorum; the Belludjages, upon the frontiers of Persia, expel the culprit from the tribe. Yet Niebuhr himself relates that a sheik of the tribe “Montesids” once had a contest of this kind among his henchmen, “avoit autorisé un défi dans ce genre entre ses domestiques et couronné le vainqueur.” (Niebuhr, “Description de l’Arabie,” Amsterdam, 1774, p. 27.) Snoring and Flatulence would seem to have been considered equally offensive by the Tartars. See Marco Polo’s reference to the mode of selecting wives for the Grand Khan (in Purchas, vol. i. p. 82). He says that the Grand Khan puts those deemed to be eligible under the care of “his Barons’ wives,” “to see if they snore not in their sleepe, if in smell or behaviour they bee not offensive.” “Yet it is holden a shame with them to let a fart, at which they wondered in the Hollanders, esteeming it a contempt.”—(“Negroes of Guinea,” Purchas, vol. v. p. 718.) On the Gold Coast of Africa, the negroes “are very careful not to let a fart, if anybody be by them; they wonder at our Netherlanders that use it so commonly, for they cannot abide that a man should fart before them, esteeming it to be a great shame and contempt done unto them.”—(Master Richard Jobson, A.D. 1620, in Purchas, vol. ii. p. 936.) In the Russian sect of dissenters called the “Bezpopovtsi,” “during the service of Holy Thursday, certain of them, known as ‘gapers’ or ‘yawners,’ sit for hours with their mouths wide open, waiting for ministering angels to quench their spiritual thirst from invisible chalices.”—(Heard, “Russian Church and Russian Dissent,” pp. 200, 201.) Bastian, in “Allerlei aus Volks- und Menschenkunde” (vol. i. p. 9), quotes from Kubary, “Religion of the Pelew Islands,” to the effect that in cases of death, the vagina, urethra, rectum, nostrils, and all other orifices of the body are tightly closed with the fibres of certain roots or sponge, to prevent the escape of any of the liquids of the body, which seem to be of some use to the spirit of the deceased.—(Contributed in a Personal letter from Dr. Gatchett of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C.)