Let us now see what the _Talmud_ itself says about the evil eye. The passage which we are about to quote is curious, not so much from the subject which it treats of, as in affording an example of the manner in which the Rabbins are wont to interpret the Scripture, and the strange and wonderful deductions which they draw from words and phrases apparently of the greatest simplicity. ‘Whosoever when about to enter into a city is afraid of evil eyes, let him grasp the thumb of his right hand with his left hand, and his left-hand thumb with his right hand, and let him cry in this manner: “I am such a one, son of such a one, sprung from the seed of Joseph”; and the evil eyes shall not prevail against him. _Joseph is a fruitful bough_, _a fruitful bough by a well_, {120a} etc. Now you should not say _by a well_, but _over an eye_. {120b} Rabbi Joseph Bar Henina makes the following deduction: _and they shall become_ (the seed of Joseph) _like fishes in multitude in the midst of the earth_. {120c} Now the fishes of the sea are covered by the waters, and the evil eye has no power over them; and so over those of the seed of Joseph the evil eye has no power.’ I have been thus diffuse upon the evil eye, because of late years it has been a common practice of writers to speak of it without apparently possessing any farther knowledge of the subject than what may be gathered from the words themselves. Like most other superstitions, it is, perhaps, founded on a physical reality. I have observed, that only in hot countries, where the sun and moon are particularly dazzling, the belief in the evil eye is prevalent. If we turn to Scripture, the wonderful book which is capable of resolving every mystery, I believe that we shall presently come to the solution of the evil eye. ‘The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.’ Ps. cxxi. v. 6. Those who wish to avoid the evil eye, instead of trusting in charms, scrawls, and Rabbinical antidotes, let them never loiter in the sunshine before the king of day has nearly reached his bourn in the west; for the sun has an evil eye, and his glance produces brain fevers; and let them not sleep uncovered beneath the smile of the moon, for her glance is poisonous, and produces insupportable itching in the eye, and not unfrequently blindness.