The extraordinarily strict rule of exogamy enforced in modern China must have originated at a time when the relatives living together in the same enclosure were of different degrees of nearness, but dwelt so entirely on the same footing that brothers and sisters could not be distinguished from cousins. A few examples of the evils of too close interbreeding or the marriage of unduly near relations would suffice to set up a rational and ineradicable prejudice among the people against any approach to those habits, which could only be absolutely excluded by a very strict rule, in the face of the opportunities of intercourse afforded in patriarchal families. like those described.

APPENDIX M.

Vol. ii., p. 77.

THE USE OF THE STAFF.

THE Egyptian figure, with a long rod, like an alpenstock, in the right hand, is familiar to the most superficial student of the wall pictures. It is so characteristic that the late M. Chabas wrote a short monograph Sur l'usage des Bâtons de main chez les Hébreux et dans l'ancienne Égypte (Annales du Musée Guimet, vol. i., 1880), illustrated by a number of Old Testament texts, alluding to the varied associations of the staff, from the shepherd's crook to the royal sceptre and the magician's rod. The staff is reckoned as no less indispensable to the traveller than his shoes, and it is apparently the same utensil which serves the overseer to urge on the workman, and the teacher the pupil whose "ears are in his back." But there is also an association of rank or authority with its possession. The permission to use the baton du commandement, which was expressly granted to Amten, was presumably a prerogative of those born to hereditary power; and a high sacerdotal functionary boasts of being "the staff of the king within the temples."

The handle of the staff was commonly ornamented and frequently inscribed; the bronze ferrule of that of Pepi, bearing his cartouche, is now at the British Museum. A portion of the gilt staff of Amenhotep III. of the Eighteenth Dynasty is among the treasures of the Leyden Museum, and the Louvre has the handles of staves once belonging to Seti I. and Rameses II. Among private possessions of this kind, one belonging to a scribe attached to the worship of the solar disk is of interest, as the only surviving proof of the existence of a temple of this heretical cult at Memphis. Age as well as rank gave a title to the honorific use of the staff, as appears from several inscriptions, such as: "An excellent staff to begin old age with, in the great hall of the temple, and to go forth with daily in going to see Ptah of the White Wall (ie. the citadel of Memphis); this is said for the benefit of the chief scribe of the God Aoh, Anoui." A shorter staff-or yard measure-belonged to a person of the same name, who is designated as "lord of the ell, whom his master always loves," and described as the

1 Professor Flinders Petrie's discovery of copper tools at Kahun has led to a more accurate method of describing the early metal objects found in Egypt. A small piece of bronze rod, almost certainly of the 4th Dynasty, has been found, but no bronze tools earlier than the 18th Dynasty; and, in the absence of analysis, the term 'bronze applied to such objects as the fragment of Pepi's staff means only that they appear to be made of some copper alloy.

K K

runner" of Pharaoh. An ebony staff at the British Museum bears the name of "Bai, royal messenger in Mesopotamia," possibly a friend and minister of the last king of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Amon and Ptah are invoked by artists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties to bestow life, health, and strength on the owners or makers of other ornamental walking sticks. Many other inscriptions are known, but differ little from those in general use for commemorative purposes.

That the use of the staff in ancient China was in all ways similar to that in Egypt appears from the fact that inscriptions engraved upon ancient staffs have been preserved (Chinese Classics, iv. i. pp. 16, 17). But the inscriptions themselves are of a disinterested moral kind. Here is one :Helping a man, be not rash;

And again :

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Holding up a man, do not wrong."

"When are you in peril?

In giving way to anger.

When do you lose the way?

In indulging in your lusts.

When do you forget your friends?
Among riches and honours."

In this case one might imagine that there is an allusion to a threefold use of the staff: as a weapon, as a walking-stick, and as a token of honour. The legend as to the general disuse of the staff in China shows that a certain idea of dignity or sanctity, or perhaps of national pride, attached to it.

In rough or mountainous country the use of a long walking-stick is so obvious that it would not seem to call for remark or need explanation; yet it is not by any means the universal custom of mountaineers to "always have a stick in their right hand," as Schweinfurth says of the men of Sokotra, and as was also observed of the Guanches. Wellsted speaks in the same way of "the crooked staff which" So-and-so “carries in common with all other Arabs." And on reflection it is not difficult to see how the habit of carrying a staff-which implies the absence of any other occupation for the right hand-was necessarily disused in classes that required the right hand to be at liberty for grasping a tool or performing other laborious tasks. The staff is a symbol of dignified leisure in a civilized man, who is as free from servile work as the wild Arab of the desert.

Naturally the last surviving traces of a lost custom will be found in connexion with religious observances, like the procession des Baguettes Blanches (to which my attention has been called by Mr. W. H. Rylands, the secretary of the Society of Biblical Archæology), held on Whit Monday at Chalons sur Marne. Down to 1605, a procession of unquestionably heathen origin to l'Étoile à Forêt was held on the Eve of St. John Baptist's Day, and

orthodox moderns, (Cartulaires de l'Evêché et du Chapitre Saint-Étienne de Chalons sur Marne, Éd. de Barthelemy, p. 91) who rejoice over the abolition of all such archaic rites, are careful to explain that the long white rods borne in the surviving procession are only a souvenir of the time when the roads outside Chalons were so bad that the priests could not walk along them without the help of such staves. Mud, however, like mountains, may exist without giving rise to the inveterate habit of walking, sitting, and standing "with the staff in the right hand," and the question whether this is not one of the minor characteristics that may be relied on as an indication of race is worth considering.