These ninety-four unclosed periods were, therefore, prolonged to the next festival, when the ampulla was taken out still _full_. Some of these periods had just commenced on the last day; others had lasted six full days after the day of their commencement. Is there any marked difference in their closing? Not in the day; for they all, with three exceptions, closed on the first day of the incoming octave, if they had run over to May or September, or on December 16, if that was the next exposition. In regard to time, there is no rule. The most numerous class, containing twenty-six instances, varied from _immediately_ to _nine hours and a half_; nine times the liquefaction occurred in less than one hour, and nine times it delayed more than three hours--the other eight times it lay between the two. The twenty-two cases of the next highest class present the same diversities of time, from _immediately_ to _nine hours and a half_. Nine instances were under an hour, eight were over three hours, the remaining five lay between the two divisions. The more those periods of fulness are examined, the more clearly does it appear that they follow no system, and can be classified or accounted for by no law. We see the mass swelling and increasing its volume and filling the ampulla, and continuing to fill it for some 203 moments, or hours, or days. We can note the facts; but why this increase? why does it rise so high? why to-day, and not yesterday, or to-morrow? why so long, or not longer? Physical science is as utterly unable to answer these questions as it is to assign a cause for the liquefaction itself, or for the various and varying phases of the blood of St. Januarius. As was stated in our preceding article, the Neapolitans hold that the proximity of the relics of the head and the reliquary with the vials of the blood to each other, is ordinarily the sufficient and determining cause of the liquefaction. Their whole ritual of the expositions is based upon this principle. The separation of the relics, or their _quasi_-separation, by a veil thrown over the reliquary of the blood, is ordinarily sufficient to terminate the liquefaction and to indurate the blood anew. But, on the other hand, the diary records a number of instances in which the blood, having been found hard, liquefied at once, even before the reliquary was placed near the bust. Several times, too, it has liquefied in the streets, while carried aloft in the afternoon procession of the vigil in May towards Santa Chiara or a _seggia_, although the bust had already been carried thither in the forenoon. So, too, a liquefaction, partially commenced in the _Tesoro_ chapel or in the cathedral, has often continued or been completed during the outdoor procession through the streets, on the festival of the patronage, in December.