on the origin of human sacrifice; but it is not difficult to believe that, to people who believe in its efficacy, the idea of offering up human beings to propitiate the deity, when laying the foundations of a public edifice, would be natural enough. Whether the notion which crops up now and again, all over Asia, really represents the tradition of a practice--whether certain monarchs ever did bury human bodies, as we bury newspapers and coins, beneath the foundations of their palaces and temples, is a question we must leave others to answer. It is conceivable that they may have done so, as an extravagant form of sacrifice; and it is also conceivable that the abounding capacity of man for distorting superstitious imagery, may have come to transmute the idea of sacrificing human beings as a measure of propitiation, into that of employing human bodies as actual elements in the foundation itself. It is possible that the inhabitants of Dinagepore conserve the more ideal and spiritual view, which the practical Chinese mind has materialised, as in the recent instance at Singapore. Anyhow, the idea is sufficiently wide-spread and curious to deserve a word of examination as well as of passing record.” [Illustration: _Fig. 1._--FIGURE FOUND UNDER THE FOUNDATIONS AT STINVEZAND.] When the north wall of the parish church of Chulmleigh in North Devon was taken down a few years ago--a wall of Perpendicular date--in it was found laid a very early carved figure of Christ crucified to a vine, or interlacing tree, such as is seen in so-called Runic monuments. The north wall having been falling in the fifteenth century, had been re-erected, and this figure was laid in it, and the wall erected over it, just as, in the same county, about the same time, the wall of Holsworthy Church was built over a human being. At Chulmleigh there was an advance in civilisation. The image was laid over the wall in place of the living victim. When, in 1842, the remains of a Romano-Batavian temple were explored at Stinvezand, near Rysbergen, a singular mummy-like object was found under the foundation. This was doubtless a substitute for the human victim. The stubborn prejudice which still exists in all parts against a first burial in a new cemetery or churchyard is due to the fact that in Pagan times the first to be buried was the victim, and in mediæval times was held to be the perquisite of the devil, who stepped into the place of the Pagan deity.