We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature. What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up in the gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superstitions grew during the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the flood of time only by the hand of the student! Among the superstitions are to be counted the magical prognosis of diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching skeleton-figure with his scythe and glass. They were heard in the cawing of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall. If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a glass or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the house. To determine the fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women. The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with "reading" and conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without reflection.