[46]: I.e. a sum which people pay to the exchequer for permission to leave the country.
[47]: Jews were formerly obliged to stand with bare feet on pig’s-skin when they took oath.
[48]: Animals may not carry anything on the Schabbes; even the lappets which fowls sometimes have tied to them as marks of distinction, have to be taken off on that day; and the Jews must get non-Jews to milk for them; they may not even wipe off dust or moisture from their persons.
[49]: Prizelius trained war-horses to stand the beating of the drums in battle, by strewing oats on the tops of drums, and beating on the lower side of them while the horses ate the oats as they jumped about on the top.
[50]: There is no plant with eleven stamens.
[51]: Two holes in a hazel-nut show that the beetle which gnawed away its kernel, in the shape of a little larval worm, has crept out in its transformed state.
[52]: Allusion to the fable that the male birds of paradise hatch the eggs on the backs of the females up in air.
[53]: Particularly on cold bright winter mornings and evenings. I (and Siebenkæs for the same reason) have been troubled with this complaint for more than twenty years, and I have had an attack of it on this coldest of Christmas eves, just as I was describing it. It is nothing but a passing paralysis of the nerves of the lungs—particularly of the nervus vagus—and in course of time (for you see even twenty years have not been enough), lends to that pulmonary apoplexy which Leville in Paris, und recently Hohnbaum, have held to be a new form of the disease, and which, perhaps, after the precedent of “Miller’s Asthma,” may receive the name of “Siebenkæsian,” or “Jean Paulish apoplexy.”
[54]: Buffon.
[55]: The husband should always play the lover by rights—and the lover the husband. It is impossible to describe the amount of soothing influence which little acts of politeness and innocent flatteries exercise upon just the very people who usually expect, and receive, none—wives, sisters, relations—and this even when they quite understand what this politeness really amounts to. We ought to be applying this emollient pomade to our rude rough lips all day long, even if we have only three words to speak,—and we should have a similar one for our hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that I shall always keep my resolution never to flatter any woman, not even my own wife, but I know I shall begin to break it four months and a-half after my betrothal, and go on breaking it all my life.