superstition, took his determining impulse from a variety of the
_Sortes Virgilianae_.

This variety was known in early times to the Jews--as early, indeed, as
the era of the Grecian Pericles, if we are to believe the Talmud. It is
known familiarly to this day amongst Polish Jews, and is called
_Bathcol_, or the _daughter of a voice_; the meaning of which
appellation is this:--The _Urim and Thummim_, or oracle in the
breast-plate of the high priest, spoke directly from God. It was,
therefore, the original or mother-voice. But about the time of
Pericles, that is, exactly one hundred years before the time of
Alexander the Great, the light of prophecy was quenched in Malachi or
Haggai; and the oracular jewels in the breast-plate became
simultaneously dim. Henceforwards the mother-voice was heard no longer:
but to this succeeded an imperfect or daughter-voice, (_Bathcol_,)
which lay in the first words happening to arrest the attention at a
moment of perplexity. An illustration, which has been often quoted from
the Talmud, is to the following effect:--Rabbi Tochanan, and Rabbi
Simeon Ben Lachish, were anxious about a friend, Rabbi Samuel, six
hundred miles distant on the Euphrates. Whilst talking earnestly
together on this subject in Palestine, they passed a school; they
paused to listen: it was a child reading the first book of Samuel; and
the words which they caught were these--_And Samuel died_. These
words they received as a _Bath-col_: and the next horseman from
the Euphrates brought word accordingly that Rabbi Samuel had been
gathered to his fathers at some station on the Euphrates.

Here is the very same case, the same _Bath-col_ substantially,
which we have cited from Orton's _Life of Doddridge_. And Du Cange
himself notices, in his Glossary, the relation which this bore to the