Show HOUGH it Is not the custom today IT THOUGH to throw overboard people who are suspected of being the cause of storms and disasters at sea yet the beliefs in jonass still flourishes and deepwater deep water wate r sailors still have a lingering opinion that the weather conditions would be vastly improved it if the suspected persons were jetti n less legs enlightened times they would have been even as was the prophet ton eon of 0 avittal the jonah superstition la Is older than jonah the prophet was merely the victim of a phoenician superstition ancient even before his day but being a celebrated case his name has clung to it ever since it Is the old idea of the appeasing of an angry god by a human sacrifice human sacrifice to baal was the main feature of phoenician worship and the phoenicians Phoenicia ns were the great seafaring people among the ancients and took their religion to sea with them in jonass day the victim appears to b have aye been chosen by lot but subsequently be came to be designated by personal peculiarities or by coincidence it Is thus that a jonah Is indicated today the writer once knew a young naval i officer who because of the mishaps which occurred to a series of 0 I 1 ships to which he was successfully attached became known throughout the I 1 service as jonah so and so not so long ago a sailor on a coasting schooner caught in a storm cried out that the tempest was because of his wickedness and jumped overboard the storm still continuing the sailors threw hla his dunnage after him and the tempest ceased 1 of such stories the name Is legion the fact that it Is getting on to three thousand years now since Phoe phoenicia nicla ceased to exist affords another example of the superiority perio rity of the vitality of a superstition over that of empires and races e Q by Neus i |