The significance of the peach and bean in this ceremony has been already explained.[280] The vulgar notion is that the beans hit the devils in the eye and blind them. A more philosophical theory is that the beans dispel the _in-aku no ki_, or female evil influences, and welcome in the _sei-yō_, green male influences. By the female influences are here meant wintry influences; by male influences those of spring. Mr. J. G. Frazer, in 'The Golden Bough,' iii. 67, second edition, gives an interesting account of another Japanese form of this custom. [Illustration] [Illustration] The _tsuina_ is only a special form of a world-wide ceremony. We may compare with it the Roman Lemuria, a festival for the souls of the dead, in which the celebrators threw black beans nine times behind their backs, believing by this ceremony to secure themselves against the Lemures. Some of my readers may have witnessed the Scotch Hogmanay, when the house is thrice circumambulated on the last day of the year in order to frighten away devils. In Lady Burton's life of her husband she tells us that at Trieste on St. Sylvester's Eve, the servants went through a very usual ceremony of forming procession and chevying the evil spirits with sticks and brooms out of the house, inviting the good spirits and good luck to come and dwell there. This is curiously like the Japanese formula just quoted. At Chæronea, in Bœotia, the chief magistrate at the town hall and every householder in his own house, as we learn from Plutarch, had on a certain day to beat a slave with rods of _agnus castus_, and turn him out of doors, with the formula, "Out hunger! in health and wealth." The "expulsion of winter" of Teutonic and Slavonic folklore belongs to the same class of customs. It should be remembered that the Japanese New Year was later than our own, and was recognized as the beginning of spring. I must not quote further from the extensive literature of this subject. The reader is referred to 'The Golden Bough,' second edition, vol. iii. pp. 39 _et seqq_., for a rich collection of evidence relating to it.