is himself the principal victim, as exemplified
by a recent instance.

A woodman, seventy-eight years of age, named
Nicolas Merlet, was making fagots in the forest
of Anjoutey, about the middle of last April.
He had lighted his pipe with a lucifer-match,
which he then threw away amongst the dead
leaves, and continued his work without further
thought. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded
by flames; stifled by the smoke, he was unable
to escape; his clothes caught fire, and burned
until reduced to tinder. When the poor
wretch's body was found, it was completely
roasted from top to toe.

ODD NOTIONS AND OLD ONES.

IT is a curious process to trace back to their
original sources many of the thoughts and
customs current among ourselves; to study the
savage germs of certain high-class social
necessities; and to see what the arts and sciences
which have revolutionised the world are like in
their first faint unconscious beginnings. This
is what Mr. Tylor* has done in a work lately
published, from which we will pick out a few
plums; but by no means to the impoverishing
of the dish; for of the three hundred and
seventy pages, there is not one which does not
contain some interesting fact or useful hint, so
that though we mean to borrow much we shall
leave more behind.

* Researches into the Early History of Mankind,
and the Development of Civilisation. By Edward
Burnet Tylor.

Would a Catholic telling his beads, or a
forgetful housekeeper tying a knot in the corner of
her handkerchief, imagine that they had
anything in common with the South American
quipus, or the Indian wampum string? Yet
they have; for rosary, wampum-string, quipus,
and the Exchequer tally, are all cousins-german.
Darius made a quipu when he took a thong
and tied sixty knots in it and gave it to the
chief of the lonians, that they might untie a
knot each day, till, if the knots were all undone,
and he had not returned, they might go back to
their own land: Le Boo made a quipu when he
tied a knot in a string for each ship he met on
his voyage, by which to remember its name and
country; and so did his father, Abba Thulle, when
he tied, first thirty knots to remember that
Captain Wilson was to come back in thirty moons,
and then added six more, as his six moons' grace
beyond. In Polynesia and the Eastern
Archipelago quipus are still in use; and forty years
ago the tax-gatherers of Hawaii kept their
records in a manner rivalling the Peruvian intricacy
of cord and knot. The herdsman of the Puna,
the high mountain plateau of Peru, still register
their farm stock on quipus. The first branch
shows the number of their bulls; the second of
their cows—divided into milch cows and dry;
the next registers their calves according to age
and sex; then come the sheep, in several
subdivisions; then the number of foxes killed, and
the quantity of salt used; and lastly the
particulars of the cattle that have died. On other
quipus they knot down the produce of the herd
in milk, cheese, wool, &c. Each heading is
indicated by a special colour or a differently
twined knot. In the old times the army registers
were kept in the same manner. One cord
knotted down the slingers, another the spearmen,
another the clubmen, others the battles
gained and lost; and in each town were special
officers—quipus readers, or knotmen, as they
were called—whose duty it was to attend to
and read these public records. There are still
some Indians in the southern provinces of
Peru who are familiar with the historical
quipus; but they keep their knowledge a
profound secret, especially from the white men.
It was a task of no small difficulty to read the
quipus, even for the initiated; and, as Mr. Tylor
says, the deciphering had generally to be
accompanied with an oral explanation to start with, as
to what special fact or record was referred to,
and whether the strings meant cows or men,
foes or foxes. This given, the rest was
comparatively easy; though, indeed, each cord had
its own meaning, and certain colours represented
fixed circumstances—as red for soldiers, yellow
for gold, white for silver, green for corn, and so
on. Our Exchequer tallies continued down to
the reign of George the Third (they were ordered
to be discontinued in 1782), are only quipus in
wood; and a chapelet, which we Protestants
will erroneously persist in calling a rosary, is
only a quipus in beads. The Peruvian quipus
were very massive. Von Tschudi says he has
dug up one weighing about eight pounds.
Rather a heavy set of tablets to carry in one's
pocket on a hot summer's day!

We all know the old stories of how certain
arbitrary kings, loving knowledge and desirous
of improving the linguistic acquirements of the
time, shut up sundry infants with dumb nurses,
then waited tor the first intelligible word, to
determine which was the original language of
humanity. Psammetichus, king of Egypt, took
two children whom he caused to be tended by a
silent keeper and suckled by goats. Their first
word was bekos, meaning in Phrygian "bread,"
but, by natural imitation, the bleat of the nanny-goat
their long-time mother; however, the
imitation was set aside, and the Phrygian
language declared to be the oldest in the world.
The Great Mogul, Akbar Khan, shut up twelve
babies and twelve deaf and dumb nurses
together; but when the children were twelve
years old, and all the great and learned had
assembled to hear their first utterances—a Jew
to judge if they spoke Hebrew, an Arab Arabian,
a Chaldec Chaldean, &c.—to the mortification
of the conclave they would not speak at all, but
expressed themselves in signs and gestures—
which, after all, constitute the original language
of man. This theory would not suit the
prejudices of all, notably of that hot-headed
Welshman who nearly murdered one of our ablest
archæologists because he doubted, and, doubting,
disputed, that Adam and Eve spoke Welsh