Note 22 — V.—CHARMS, SPELLS, AMULETS AND DIVINATIONS.

It is only within the last ten years that the attention of English readers has been markedly drawn to this strange agreement of Chinese with Western belief and practice—in the first instance,22 by the Rev. J. Doolittle, in a series of papers contributed originally to the China Mail and subsequently published in book form in 1867; and in the same and following years, more exhaustively, in Notes and Queries on China and Japan, by the Rev. E. J. Eitel, PH.D., whose thorough and scholarly papers on Chinese matters render him a high authority. Readers of that now defunct periodical will doubtless, in consideration of the papers in question being out of print and unknown to the majority of the British public, pardon my here transferring Dr. Eitel’s remarks almost verbatim; the more so as any original account I could give would be but a mere variation in language:—