OMENS AMONG SAILORS.

THERE is a very singular marine superstition noted in Petronius Arbiter; it is that no person in a ship must pare his nails or cut his hair, except in a storm. Bishop Hall, in his Characters of Vertues and Vices, speaking of the superstitious man, observes that "he will never set to sea but on a Sunday." Sailors have various puerile apprehensions of its being ominous to whistle on shipboard, to carry a corpse in their vessel, &c.

Sailors, usually the boldest men alive, are yet frequently the very abject slaves of superstitious fear. "Innumerable," says Scot on Witchcraft, p. 53, "are the reports of accidents unto such as frequent the seas, as fishermen and sailors, who discourse of noises, flashes, shadows, echoes, and other visible appearances, nightly seen and heard upon the surface of the water."

Andrews, in his Anecdotes, p. 331, says: "Superstition and profaneness, those extremes of human conduct, are too often found united in the sailor; and the man who dreads the stormy effects of drowning a cat, or of whistling a countrydance while he leans over the gunwale, will, too often, wantonly defy his Creator by the most daring execrations and the most licentious behaviour." He softens, however, the severity of this charge by owning "that most assuredly he is thoughtless of the faults he commits."

I find the following in a Helpe to Memory and Discourse, 12mo. Lond. 1630, p. 56: “Q. Whether doth a dead body in a shippe cause the shippe to sayle slower, and if it doe, what is thought to be the reason thereof?-A. The shippe is as insensible of the living as of the dead; and as the living make it goe the faster, so the dead make it not goe the slower, for the dead are no Rhemoras to alter the course of her passage, though some there be that thinke so, and that by a kind of mournful sympathy."

"Our sailors," says Dr. Pegge (under the signature of T.

"Audio enim non licere cuiquam mortalium in nave neque ungues neque capillos deponere, nisi quum pelago ventus irascitur." Petron. 369 edit. Mich. Hadrianid. And Juvenal, Sat. xii. 1. 81, says:

"Tum stagnante sinu, gaudent ubi vertice raso
Garrula securi narrare pericula nautæ."

Row), in the Gent. Mag. for January, 1763, xxxiii. 14, “I am told, at this very day, I mean the vulgar sort of them, have a strange opinion of the devil's power and agency in stirring up winds, and that is the reason they so seldom whistle on shipboard, esteeming that to be a mocking, and consequently an enraging, of the devil. And it appears now that even Zoroaster himself imagined there was an evil spirit, called Vato, that could excite violent storms of wind.”

Sir Thomas Browne has the following singular passage: "That a kingfisher, hanged by the bill, showeth us what quarter the wind is, by an occult and secret propriety, converting the breast to that point of the horizon from whence the wind doth blow, is a received opinion and very strange-introducing natural weathercocks, and extending magnetical positions as far as animal natures; a conceit supported chiefly by present practice, yet not made out by reason or experience." The common sailors account it very unlucky to lose a waterbucket or a mop. To throw a cat overboard, or drown one at sea, is the same. Children are deemed lucky to a ship. Whistling at sea is supposed to cause increase of wind, and is therefore much disliked by seamen, though sometimes they themselves practise it when there is a dead calm.

[Davy Jones.-"This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters, to which a seafaring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe."Peregrine Pickle, chap. 13.]

In Canterbury Guests, or a Bargain Broken, a comedy, by Ravenscroft, 4to. p. 24, we read:"My heart begins to leap, and play like a porpice before a storm." Pennant says, in

his Zoology, iii. 67, that "the appearance of the dolphin and the porpesse are far from being esteemed favorable omens by the seamen, for their boundings, springs, and frolics in the water are held to be sure signs of an approaching gale."

"Por

Willsford, in his Nature's Secrets, p. 135, tells us : paises, or sea-hogs, when observed to sport and chase one another about ships, expect then some stormy weather. Dolphins, in fair and calm weather, persuing one another as one of their waterish pastimes, foreshews wind, and from that part whence

they fetch their frisks; but if they play thus when the seas are rough and troubled, it is a sign of fair and calm weather to ensue. Cuttles, with their many legs, swimming on the top of the water, and striving to be above the waves, do presage a storm. Sea-urchins thrusting themselves into the mud, or striving to cover their bodies with sand, foreshews a storm. Cockles, and most shell-fish, are observed against a tempest to have gravel sticking hard unto their shells, as a providence of nature to stay or poise themselves, and to help weigh them down, if raised from the bottome by surges. Fishes in general, both in salt and fresh waters, are observed to sport most, and bite more eagerly, against rain than at any other time."

WEATHER OMENS.

THE learned Moresin, in his Papatus, reckons among omens the hornedness of the moon, the shooting of the stars, and the cloudy rising of the sun. Shakespeare, in his Richard II., act ii. sc. 4, tells us :

"Meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-fac'd moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change :
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.'

In a Defensative against the Poyson of supposed Prophecies, by the Earl of Northampton, 1583, we read: "When dyvers, uppon greater scrupulosity than cause, went about to disswade her Majestye (Queen Elizabeth), lying then at Richmonde, from looking on the comet which appeared last; with a courage auswerable to the greatnesse of her state, shee caused the windowe to be sette open, and cast out thys worde, jacta est alea, the dyce are throwne, affirming that her stedfast hope and confidence was too firmly planted in the providence of God to be blasted or affrighted with those beames, which either had a ground in nature whereuppon to rise, or at least no warrant out of scripture to portend the

1

"Lunæ corniculationem, solis nubilum ortum, stellarum trajectiones in aere." Papatus, p. 21.

mishappes of princes." He adds: "I can affirm thus much, as a present witnesse, by mine owne experience.'

There is nothing superstitious in prognostications of weather from aches and corns. "Aches and corns," says Lord Verulam, "do engrieve (afflict) either towards rain or frost; the one makes the humours to abound more, and the other makes them sharper." Thus also Butler, in his Hudibras, p. iii. c. ii. 1. 405:

"As old sinners have all points

O' th' compass in their bones and joints,
Can by their pangs and aches find
All turns and changes of the wind,
And, better than by Napier's bones,
Feel in their own the age of moons."

Googe, in his translation of Naogeorgus's Popish Kingdome, fol. 44, has the following passage on Sky Omens :

"Beside they give attentive eare to blinde astronomars,
About th' aspects in every howre of sundrie shining stars;
And underneath what planet every man is borne and bred,
What good or evill fortune doth hang over every hed.
Hereby they thinke assuredly to know what shall befall,
As men that have no perfite fayth nor trust in God at all
But thinke that everything is wrought and wholly guided here,
By mooving of the planets, and the whirling of the speare."

In the Secret Memoirs of the late Mr. Duncan Campbell, 1732, pp. 61-2, we read: "There are others, who from the clouds calculate the incidents that are to befal them, and see men on horseback, mountains, ships, forests, and a thousand other fine things in the air."

In the following passage from Gay's first Pastoral are some curious rural omens of the weather:

"We learnt to read the skies,

To know when hail will fall, or winds arise.

He taught us erst the heifer's tail to view,

When stuck aloft, that show'rs would straight ensue;

He first that useful secret did explain,

Why pricking corns foretold the gath❜ring rain;

When swallows fleet soar high and sport in air,

He told us that the welkin would be clear."

Thus also in the Trivia of the same poet, similar omens oc cur for those who live in towns:

"But when the swinging signs your ears offend
With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend;
Soon shall the kennels swell with rapid streams-

On hosier's poles depending stockings tied
Flag with the slacken'd gale from side to side;
Church monuments foretel the changing air;
Then Niobe dissolves into a tear,

And sweats with secret grief; you'll hear the sounds
Of whistling winds, ere kennels break their bounds;
Ungrateful odours common shores diffuse,

And dropping vaults distil unwholesome dews,
Ere the tiles rattle with the smoking show'r," &c.

In the British Apollo, fol. Lond. 1708, i. No. 51, is said:

"A learned case I now propound,
Pray give an answer as profound;
'Tis why a cow, about half an hour
Before there comes a hasty shower,

Does clap her tail against the hedge?"

In Tottenham Court, a comedy, 4to. Lond. 1638, p. 21, we read: "I am sure I have foretold weather from the turning up of my cowe's tayle."

[The following curious lines respecting the hedgehog occur in Poor Robin's Almanack for 1733:

"Observe which way the hedge-hog builds her nest,

To front the north or south, or east or west;

For if 'tis true that common people say,
The wind will blow the quite contrary way:
If by some secret art the hedge-hogs know,
So long before, which way the winds will blow,
She has an art which many a person lacks,
That thinks himself fit to make almanacks."]

From the following simile given by Bodenham, in his Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses, p. 153, it should seem that our ancestors held somehow or other the hedgehog to be a prognosticator of the weather. Edit. 8vo. Lond. 1600: "As hedge-hogs doe fore-see ensuing stormes, So wise men are for fortune still prepared." The following simile is found in Bishop Hall's Virgidemiarum, 12mo. 1598, p. 85:

"So lookes he like a marble toward rayne."

In the Husbandman's Practice, or Prognostication for Ever, 8vo. Lond. 1664, p. 137, I find the following omens of rain : "Ducks and drakes shaking and fluttering their wings when they rise-young horses rubbing their backs against the ground -sheep bleating, playing, or skipping wantonly-swine being