In view of the severe and general condemnation of magical practices found throughout Holy Writ it is remarkable that the Pentateuchal narrative does not censure Joseph’s hydromantic arts. Indeed, except in the book Genesis, it is seldom that any forms of presaging or the use of charms are noted save with stern reprobation. In Isaias iii. 2, however, the Kōsēm, magician or diviner, is mentioned with singular respect. “Ecce enim dominator Dominus exercituum auferet a Jerusalem et a Juda ualidum et fortem omne robur panis et omne robur aquæ, fortem, et uirum bellatorem, iudicem, et prophetam, et _hariolum_, et senem.” Here the Authorized Version deliberately mistranslates and obscures the sense: “For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah, the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, and _the prudent_, and the ancient.” “The Prudent” is by no means a rendering of Kōsēm which “hariolus” perfectly represents. In the thirteenth chapter of Genesis we have a most detailed and striking narrative of sympathetic magic. Jacob, who is serving Laban, is to receive as a portion of his hire all the speckled and spotted cattle, all the brown among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats. But the crafty old Syrian prevented his son-in-law by removing to a distance, a journey of three days, all such herds as had been specified, “and Jacob fed the rest of Laban’s flocks. Thereupon Jacob took rods of green poplar, hazel, and chestnut, and peeled these rods in alternate stripes of white and bark, and he put them in the gutters in the watering-troughs when the flocks came to drink.” The animals duly copulated, and “the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle, ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.” Moreover, it was only when the stronger cattle conceived that Jacob set the rods before their eyes, so that eventually all the best of the herds fell to his share. The names of the trees are in themselves significant. The poplar in Roman folklore was sacred to Hercules,[31] and as it grew on the banks of the river Acheron in Epirus it was connected with Acheron, the waters of woe in the underworld, a confused tradition which is undoubtedly of very early origin. So Pausanias has: τὴν λευκην ὁ Ἡρακλῆς πεφυκυῖαν παρὰ τὸν Ἀχέροντα εὔρετο ἐν Θεσπρωτιᾳ ποταμόν· In seventeenth-century England poplar-leaves were accounted an important ingredient in hell-broths and charms. The hazel has been linked with magic from remotest antiquity, and the very name witch-hazel remains to-day. The chestnut-tree and its nuts seem to have been associated with some primitive sexual rites. The connexion is obscure, but beyond doubt traceable. In that most glorious marriage song, the Epithalamium of Catullus, as the boys sang their Fescennines of traditional obscenity nuts were scattered among the