ONE:Formerly an apprentice entered a shop to learn hand skill, and to acquaint himself with a number of mysterious processes; to learn a series of arbitrary rules which might serve to place him at a disadvantage even with those whose capacity was inferior and who had less education; but now the whole is changed. An engineer apprentice enters the shop with a confidence that he may learn whatever the facilities afford if he will put forth the required efforts; there are no mysteries to be solved; nearly all problems are reached and explained by science, leaving a greater share of the shop-time of a learner to be devoted to studying what is special.Another wide-spread superstition was the belief in prophetic or premonitory dreams. This was shared by some even among those who rejected supernatural religion,a phenomenon not unparalleled at the present day. Thus the228 elder Pliny tells us how a soldier of the Praetorian Guard in Rome was cured of hydrophobia by a remedy revealed in a dream to his mother in Spain, and communicated by her to him. The letter describing it was written without any knowledge of his mishap, and arrived just in time to save his life.348 And Pliny was himself induced by a dream to undertake the history of the Roman campaigns in Germany.349 Religious believers naturally put at least equal confidence in what they imagined to be revelations of the divine will. Galen, the great physician, often allowed himself to be guided by dreams in the treatment of his patients, and had every reason to congratulate himself on the result. The younger Pliny, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and the emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, were all influenced in a similar manner; and among these Dion, who stands last in point of time, shows by his repeated allusions to the subject that superstition, so far from diminishing, was continually on the increase.350
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