which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts had formerly to witness standing on one foot. On the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic it might be thought that the higher the priests swing the higher will grow the rice. For the ceremony is described as a harvest festival,(421) and swinging is practised by the Letts of Russia with the avowed intention of influencing the growth of the crops. In the spring and early summer, between Easter and St. John’s Day (the summer solstice), every Lettish peasant is said to devote his leisure hours to swinging diligently; for the higher he rises in the air the higher will his flax grow that season.(422) The gilded plough with which the Siamese mock king opens the ploughing may be compared with the bronze ploughs which the Etruscans employed at the ceremony of founding cities;(423) in both cases the use of bare iron was probably forbidden on superstitious grounds.(424) (M126) In the foregoing cases the temporary king is appointed annually in accordance with a regular custom. But in other cases the appointment is made only to meet a special emergency, such as to relieve the real king from some actual or threatened evil by diverting it to a substitute, who takes his place on the throne for a short time. The history of Persia furnishes instances of such occasional substitutes for the Shah. Thus Shah Abbas the Great, the most eminent of all the kings of Persia, who reigned from 1586 to 1628 A.D., being warned by his astrologers in the year 1591 that a serious danger impended over him, attempted to avert the omen by abdicating the throne and appointing a certain unbeliever named Yusoofee, probably a Christian, to reign in his stead. The substitute was accordingly crowned, and for three days, if we may trust the Persian historians, he enjoyed not only the name and the state but the power of the king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to death: the decree of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and Abbas, who reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was promised by his astrologers a long and glorious reign.(425) Again, Shah Sufi II., who reigned from 1668 to 1694 A.D., was crowned a second time and changed his name to Sulaiman or Soliman under the following circumstances: “The King, a few days after, was out of danger, but the matter was to restore him to perfect health. Having been always in a languishing condition, and his physicians never able to discover the cause of his distemper, he suspected that their ignorance retarded his recovery, and two or three of them were therefore ill treated. At length the other physicians, fearing it might be their own turn next, bethought themselves, that Persia being at the same time afflicted with a scarcity of provisions and the King’s sickness, the fault must be in the astrologers, who had not chosen a favourable hour when the King was set upon the throne, and therefore persuaded him that the