the Greeks, on the way to Mycale, were encouraged in their enterprise by the arrival of a deputation from Samos, one of the members of which was named Hegesistratus, the leader of armies. Cases may be pointed out in which something which could have no real effect but to make persons _think_ of misfortune, was regarded not merely as a prognostic, but as something approaching to an actual cause of it. The _εὐφήμει_ of the Greeks, and _favete linguis_, or _bona verba quæso_, of the Romans, evince the care with which they endeavoured to repress the utterance of any word expressive or suggestive of ill fortune; not from notions of delicate politeness, to which their general mode of conduct and feeling had very little reference, but from _bonâ fide_ alarm lest the event so suggested to the imagination should in fact occur. Some vestige of a similar superstition has been known to exist among uneducated persons even in our own day: it is thought an unchristian thing to talk of, or suppose, the death of any person while he is alive. It is known how careful the Romans were to avoid, by an indirect mode of speech, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity: how instead of _mortuus est_ they said _vixit_; and "be the event fortunate or _otherwise_" instead of _adverse_. The name Maleventum, of which Salmasius so sagaciously detected the Thessalian origin (_Μαλόεις_, _Μαλοέντος_), they changed into the highly propitious denomination, Beneventum; Egesta into Segesta; and Epidamnus, a name so interesting in its associations to the reader of Thucydides, they exchanged for Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of _damnum_ or detriment. "If an hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas Browne,[2] "there are few above threescore that are not perplexed thereat; which notwithstanding is but an augurial terror, according to that received expression, _Inauspicatum dat iter oblatus lepus_. And the ground of the conceit was probably no greater than this, that a fearful animal passing by us portended unto us something to be feared; as upon the like consideration the meeting of a fox presaged some future imposture." Such superstitions as these last must be the result of study; they are too recondite for natural or spontaneous growth. But when the attempt was once made to construct a science of predictions, any association, though ever so faint or remote, by which an object could be connected in however far-fetched a manner with ideas either of prosperity or of danger and misfortune, was enough to determine its being classed among good or evil omens.