The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-06-08
KISSING THE BOOK.
A Relic of the Time When Kissing
 Was General in Merry England. :.

The Lancet. ,c
 Sir Francis Jenne and Mir. Justice Gorell Barnes have had posted outside the two courts of. Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division notices to witnesses calling their attention to the fact that they may be sworn in the Scotch manner before giv- ing evidence. That is to say, they may be sworn with uplifted hand repeating a solemn invocation to the Deity. instead of taking a book and kissing it after listen- ing to form repea ted by 2 minor ofti- cial of the court. The notice to which we refer is repeated outside one the courts of the Chancery Division and we have every hope that 1t may become universal
 We have for many years contended that the oath by kissing a book has nothing to commend it, while 1t is nasty and may become a means of propagation of disease: and we have seen with regret that the statutory permission to swear in the Scotch fashion was. as rule. not known by witnesses and frequently, also. that judges. coroners and magistrates were ignorant of 1t.
 The form of swearing by kissing a book is purely one of custom. There Is no di- rect authority for 1t in any act of Par lament, or rule, or book of practice. The date also of its introduction is unknown, but this is not because 1t has been lost in the mists of antiquity. for it is fairly certain that, so recently as at the end of the seventeenth century if the form ex- isted 1t was not in any general use. It has been pointed out that Coke in his institutes makes no mention of kissing the book, but writes of the corporal oath' as thus named because the witness touched with his hand a portion of the scriptures, and this aspect of the oath no doubt survives in the familiar warn- ing of the usher to the witness to remove the glove before taking the Testament for the purpose of kissing it. It also ob- served that in the Book of Oaths," of which an edition was published in 1889. there Is no mention of kissing book. IIox.f tsrs, nta1 se I.,tf almost as much a matter of speculation as is the date at which it became fre- quent or universal.
 The laying of the hand on the Cos pels in swearing is, no doubt of great antiquity while the laying of the hand on the altar of a deity in invoking the deity to witness a statement or promise Is older than the Gospels. The laying of the hand on the Gospels has its parallel In other countries besides England. The kissing of the book Is, however. we be- lieve, peculiar to England or to England and Ireland. and 1t Is not quite easy to assign It's origin to the kissing of relics when we apparently find it introduced In England after all veneration for relics had been swept away and made illegal.
 It is worth noting that English people were more addicted to kissing once than they are now. Kissing as a form of salu- tation YVES So common among them that It excited the interest and amusement of foreigners. Erasmus refers to it and a Hungarian gentleman who visited Lon don and moved in good society in 1883 was much struck with the way in which men kissed ladies when they greeted them where Hungarians would have shaken hands. Even Frenchmen in :he Middle Ages held kissing as a peculiarity of the English nation. much as we remark upon it now among the French. It is, therefore. at least possible that the kiss upon the book in taking an oath may have been not so much a kiss A veneration as form of salutation or acknowledgement ny bodily contact, but still not associated with any great feeling of solemnity.