Exurgat deus and dissipeatur
Inimici iis spiteful.
The schoolmaster's explanation is added, but the author says the words are only mis-spelt passages from the Vulgate.
Yours respectfully,
Edyart Woodhouse,
(B.A. and LL.B. of St. John's, Camb.).
The following is from a letter by Rev. A. K. Chignell, St. Anne's Presbytery, Bridlington:
16th June, 1919.
Dear Sir,
(1) Nose-piercing.—Natives at Wanigela, in Collingwood Bay (Papua), have told me that their reason for piercing the nose was that after burial the worms would go in at one nostril and come out at the other, instead of going up into the head and eating away the brains. May this (materialistic) explanation have any connection with the idea of re-incarnation referred to on p. 262, though the Papuans, as far as my slight knowledge goes, do not expect re-incarnation.
(2) Their reason for thrusting bones through their noses, men have told me, was to make themselves look fierce (i.e. like a wild boar, the biggest animal in Papua) and so terrify their enemies.
(3) Reading the chapter "Seething a Kid" (Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. iii. p. in et seq.), I was hoping to find some reference to the non-eating of cheese by women in England in early Victorian days. I can give no chapter or verse, but my impression is that it was considered unseemly for a woman or a girl to touch cheese. I have always wondered why, but thought it was now to be explained.
(4) A Solomon Islander, employed as a teacher in New Guinea by the Mission, has repeatedly wakened me at night by firing his gun to scare away the daus (spirits) from his house—and sometimes the natives in the village, not satisfied with minor
