COLLECTANEA.
Folk-Lore in the Old Testament.
Sir James Frazer kindly sends the following letters on questions connected with his recent work, Folk-lore in the Old Testament:
I have just been reading your book on the Folk-lore in the Old Testament with great interest and profit. There is one point on which you may be interested to have further information; viz. the story of how Gideon chose his men. When I was in Palestine some years ago friends who knew the country advised me never to drink direct from a spring or stream but to adopt the method of Gideon’s selected men—not for magical reasons but on sanitary grounds. The springs and streams of Palestine abound in leeches, which a careless drinker is very apt to swallow. They stick in the throat and cause serious haemorrhage and discomfort (see Masterman, Parasitology, vol. i. p. 282 (1908)). While, therefore, it is quite correct to say that by noting how men drank water from a stream Gideon was testing them for carefulness, I doubt very much whether the test had any magical or sentimental basis. In a recent trip to Seistan in Eastern Persia I noticed Indian coolies carefully skimming water from the surface of springs in the desert with a brass dish for the same reason. Curiously, or perhaps naturally, enough, they were well acquainted with the presence of the leeches, the existence of which was entirely ignored by the sanitary authorities of their Cordon.
Since I have studied the natural history of Palestine on the spot I have been much struck by the fact that the old Hebrews were, compared with the Romans and the Greeks, extremely accurate observers of nature, and fond of scattering in their
