31. I have good reason to believe that should the Imperial Government grant the terms and conditions above suggested, the Imperial Ottoman Public Works Loan" could be raised at least at the same price as that of 1862, the probability being in favour of a higher price. 66 THE KAISAR I HIND. THERE are those at home who apparently, from a pure spirit of opposition-for we cannot suppose them utterly devoid of patriotism-cavil at the employment of Indian or Colonial troops outside of their country, as if such employment has not become historical, and has not been repeated over and over again, just as the French have had their Turcos and their Zouaves. But Sir Henry Elliot, in his last published volume (the eighth) of his History of India," quotes the Akbarah i Hind of one Muhammad Riza, written in the time of "John Company," and who, discussing the constitution and Government of England, says: "The ruling power is possessed by two parties-one the King, who is lord of the State; and the other the Honourable Company. The former governs his own country; and the latter, though only subjects, exceed the King in power, and are directors of mercantile affairs." The position of things has altered since then, and we have a Queen of Great Britain and an Empress of India. Is the latter to abandon her authority merely to relieve the susceptibilities of croaking old ladies? The Hindus might turn round upon such parochial legislation, and tell them that the Kaisir i Hind is more powerful than the Queen of Great Britain. The Minister who inaugurated an Empire of India created a bulwark to Russian omnipotence; and Napoleon the Great is credited with having said that he who held the Empire of India held the empire of the world. GREAT EIVERS OF THIBET. AN interesting geographical problem-that of the identity of the Brahmaputra with the Sanpo, or great river of Thibet-may be expected to be shortly solved. Major Godwin- Austin is of opinion that this generally accepted view is incorrect, and in a paper read by him before the British Association last year, he contended that the Subansiri was the great river of Thibet. This theory is either based on, or corroborated by, the reports of some of the native agents of the Indian Survey, who have done so much in late years towards clearing up the geography of the trans. Himalayan regions, and which favour this supposition. On the other hand, it has been argued that it is incomprehensible how the bulk of water in the Sanpo, which at its lowest known point in Thibet is 500 yards wide, can be contained in the charnel of the Subansin, which at a point three or four days journey up stream, is only 70 yards wide, the two points being separated by a gap of over 200 miles as the crow flies. It is satisfactory to learn that arrangements have been made for Lieutenant Harman, R.E., to explore the course of the Subansin river as far as the first high range; and for Lieutenant Wood. thorpe to examine the Mishmi country between the Dihong and the Brahmakund. Excepting regions actually unknown, there does not remain a district of the earth's surface of greater interest from its physical configuration, and yet involved in so much obscurity, as that at the head of the waters of the Brahmaputra, the Irawady, the Mainam, the Maykiang, and the great rivers of China. LEPER HOSPITALS. THE great number of these institutions which existed in England and Scotland in former ages, serves to indicate how prevalent this fearful and loathsome disease was amongst our ancestors. In a paper written some years ago, by Dr. James Simpson, one of the professors at the Edinburgh University, and printed in the Edinburgh Medical Journal, that gentleman gives a list of the names and places of no less than 114 leper hospitals in the two kingdoms, which number he observes, might be increased, if the records of these institutions had been preserved. There appear to have been no fewer than seven of these houses for London, amongst which are named St. Giles's and St. James's, the site of the latter being now occupied by the palace. Edinburgh had a leper hospital as late as the end of the sixteenth century. Almost every county town, besides many other towns in England and Scotland, possessed one or more of these institutions. They were to be met with from the south coasts of England, to as far north as Papa Stour, in Shetland. The two universities were represented; Oxford by St. Bartholemew's, and Cambridge by "The Hospital of Lazars." Norfolk appears to have been the county which had the most of these hospitals. The town of Norwich had six: St. Mary Magdalene's, St. Mary's, without St. Magdalene's Gate, without St. Bennet's Gate, without St. Giles' Gate, and without St. Stephen's Gate; whilst Lynne, in Norfolk, had five: St. Mary Magdalene's, St, John's, West Lynne, Cowgate, and Letch Hithe. We may yet occasionally hear of such localities as "Lazar's Hill," and so forth, in the neighbourhood of some of our towns. Every rank in life, observes Dr. Simpson, was liable to be attacked by this dreaded disease, which did not respect even royalty itself. Henry III. was suspected of being a leper; King Robert the Bruce was stricken with the malady; our Henry IV. was more than suspected of suffering from it. The youngest son of Robert Blanchmaine, Earl of Leicester, temp., Henry II., who founded the Hospital of St. Leonard's at Leicester, was himself a leper. But the largest share of the victims to leprosy was to be found amongst the lower classes; rope makers were generally shunned as lepers, because their trade was one which, at the early part of the Middle Ages, was principally followed by pilgrims who had returned in a leprous state from the East. So great was the dread our ancestors had for this loathsome disease that men would turn aside from those nearest and dearest to them if stricken by it; indeed, the unfortunate leper was obliged, both by law and custom, to separate himself from society. Into many towns he was forbidden to enter at all, and generally the the most stringent restrictions were placed upon his locomotion. When walking abroad he was compelled to use a "clapper," in order, by its noise, to warn the healthy to avoid him; whilst, at the same time, he carried a "cop," or receiving dish, into which the charitable might drop their alms. In short, when a person became infected with leprosy, he was looked upon as politically dead, for by the law of England lepers were placed in the same condition as idiots, madmen, outlaws, and so forth, and were liable to be removed by a writ de leprosa amovendo. Dr. Simpson refers to a case of leprosy in Shetland, as late as the latter end of the last century. GIVING THE DEAD TO THE DOGS. WITHOUT Writing a long dissertation on funeral customs, ancient and modern, that of giving the dead to dogs might well be investigated a little further. A survival of the custom, as Professor Monier Williams said, is observed by the Parsees,-the Professor might have given an apposite quotation from Herodotus ; the Abbé Huc tells us that the custom itself exists in Thibet. Strabo gave it to the Scythians, whose place in ethnology has yet to be fixed. Rawlinson holds that the Scythians were an Aryan people; Mr. Wheeler going still further, sees a likeness between some of the Scythians, some of the Moghul tribes, and the Aryan Rajputs. The latter authority, perhaps, could make something of this strange sort of burial; more especially as Prejevalsky found it amongst the Northern Monghols. Near the Russian town of Urga, which is the holy city of Northern Mongholia-the second archbishopric of Lamaism-there is a burying place, where "the dead bodies, instead of being interred, are flung to the dogs and birds of prey." The horrid cemetery, says Prejevalsky, is littered with bones, amongst which the dogs prowl like ghosts, to see their daily meal of human flesh. The custom has no terror for the Monghol, who sees with perfect coolness the dogs tearing his father o mother to pieces. Prejevalsky adds, and this perhaps is noteworthy, that princes, gigens, and lamas of importance are not given to dogs, but are interred or burned. Horace Della Penna, a Capuchin Friar who visited Lhassa in 1719, and there established a Catholic mission, also describes the custom noticed by Abbé Huc and the others. When a man dies in Thibet, says the Friar, the first thing to be done is for a lama to remove the hair from the top of the defunct's head, that the soul may be extracted and perform a favourable migration. Then, after prayers are said and various rites performed, the corpse is divided by a lama chosen for the purpose, and distributed by him amongst the dogs. When the meal is done, the dead man's friends carry home his clean picked bones, to hang them up in his room, where hired monks pray and sacrifice for his transmigrated soul. As in Northern Mongholia, the "corpses of some nobles, with the permission of the Supreme or Vice Grand Lama, are burned; those of kings, the Supreme or Vice Grand Lamas, are burned with sandal-wood." If travellers have always been as truthful as Huc and Prejevalsky, still stranger customs one prevailed. In Dagroian, says an old traveller, when a man is sick the magicians are consulted; if they foretell his death, he is at once suffocated; he is then cooked and eaten by his own kin. A STORY OF W. C. BRYANT. WILLIAM C. BRYANT, the venerable poet and journalist, who has so recently been taken from us, when a young man, practised law in the western part of Massachusetts. The circumstance which induced him to give up that profession and become a journalist, is said to have been disgust with the technicalities of pleading. Young Bryant brought an action of slander for one Bloss against one Tobey, for saying that he (Bloss) had "burnt his own store. There is no doubt in my mind that he burnt his own store. He would not have got his goods insured if he had not meant to burn it." The case was tried, and the jury returned a verdict of five hundred dollars damages. Tobey's lawyers moved the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for an arrest of judgment, because the words were not slanderous in themselves, it not being an offence for a man simply to burn his own store. The court decided, Chief-Justice Parsons giving its opinion, that simply to burn one's own store is not unlawful, when not accompanied by an injury to, or by a desire to injure some other person. Therefore to charge a man with burning his own store is not slanderous, for it does not charge him with a criminal offence. If Tobey had said-such is the reasoning of the courtthat Bloss burnt his own store with the intention of getting the insurance on the goods, such words would have charged him with a criminal offence, and would have been slanderous. The judgment was therefore set aside, and Mr. Bryant, so it is said, was so disgusted with the law, which, by a technicality, deprived his client of a remedy for a slander, that he gave up his profession. Those of our readers who are lawyers will find the case of Bloss v. Tobey reported in 2 Pickering's Reports, p. 320. A VISION OF GOD. I SAW a vision of the Most High God: And when His heaven of heavens seem'd void and lone, That in the hollow of His hand He binds; MATTHEW SETON. |