Note 7 — VI.—SUPERSTITIONS AS TO VARIOUS SUBJECTS.

Alexander, if we may credit the account given by Quintus Curtius, was terrified by blood flowing from inside his soldiers’ bread during the siege of Tyre in 332 B.C. His seer, Aristanda, foresaw in this crimson efflux of the vital stream out of the commissariat a happy issue for the Macedonian; and the warriors thus never took Tyre. From the year 1004, the alarming spectacle of the bleeding host and bread, as well as the bewitched bloody milk, several times in each century, gave simple folk a scare. But the victims of superstition have the bump of casualty remarkably developed, and, in 1410, thirty-eight Jews were burnt to ashes because they had tortured the consecrated host until it bled.—Chambers’ Journal. ↑