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choose what he will be. If you do not bias the child, the first that he meets on the street, or in his school, or among his companions, will begin the work of biasing, of impression, of education, of training; for this is a continuous process. Whether you will or not, it is something over which you have no choice. It is something that will be done either wisely and well, or unwisely and ill.—

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Remainders Saved—See.

Remains of Insects—See.

REMEDIES, STRANGE

There are many remedies, real or reputed for physical ills, but there is but one sovereign remedy for body, soul and spirit, namely, the life of God fully received into the human soul. In an article on "Strange Medicines," in the Nineteenth Century, Miss Cumming quotes a few of the healing spells which to this day are practised by the peasantry of various districts in Great Britain, and which are considered certain remedies:

The Northumbrian cure for warts is to take a large snail, rub the wart well with it, and then impale the snail on a thorn-hedge. As the creature wastes away the warts will surely disappear. In the west of England eel's blood serves the same purpose. For goiter or wen, the hand of a dead child must be rubbed nine times across the lump, or, still better, the hand of a suicide may be substituted. In the vicinity of Stamfordham, in Northumberland, whooping-cough is cured by putting the head of a live trout into the patient's mouth, and letting the trout breathe into the latter. Or else a hairy caterpillar is put into a small bag and tied around the child's neck. The cough ceases as the insect dies. Another cure for whooping-cough is offerings of hair. In Sunderland the crown of the head is shaved and the hair hung upon a bush or tree, with the full faith that as the birds carry away the hair, so will the cough vanish. In Lincolnshire a girl suffering from the ague cuts a lock of her hair and binds it around an aspen-tree, praying the latter to shake in her sted. The remedy for a toothache at Tavistock, in Devonshire, is to bite a tooth from a skull in the churchyard and keep it always in the pocket. At Loch Carron, in Ross-*shire, an occasional cure for erysipelas is to cut off half the ear of a cat and let the blood drip on the inflamed surface. In Cornwall the treatment for the removal of whelks or small pimples from the eyelids of children is to pass the tail of a black cat nine times over the part affected. Toads are made to do service in divers manners in Cornwall and Northampton for the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy, while "toad powder," or even a live toad or spider shut up in a box, is still in some places accounted as useful a charm against contagion as it was in the days of Sir Kenelm Digby. The old small-pox and dropsy remedy known as pulvis Ethiopicus, was nothing more nor less than powdered toad. In Devonshire any person bitten by a viper is advised to kill the creature at once and rub the wound with its fat. It is said that this practise has survived in some portions of the United States, where the flesh of the rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite. Black, in his "Folk Medicine," states that the belief in the power of snake-skin as a cure for rheumatism still exists in New England. Such a belief is probably a direct heritage from Britain.

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The following is the belief of Eastern Jews in very queer remedies:

For hoarseness and complaints of the throat and air-passages an approved prescription is to take a new plate, write on it with ink the three mystic names compounded of the Hebrew letters, "Ain, Yod, Aelph," "Vau, Teth," and "Teth, Yod, Koph"; then wash them out with wine, and after adding three grains of a citron used at the tabernacle festival, drink the beverage. Fits, epileptic, and ordinary, are treated after the following fashion: The patient's head is covered and a pious neighbor stands by the bedside while the "practitioner" called in recites this invocation: "In the name of the Lord of Israel, in the name of the angel Raphael, and in the name of the hosts of heaven, and in the name of the One hidden and concealed, I adjure you to quit the body of So-and-So, the son of So-and-So, to quit him at once and without doing him hurt; and if you do not go, I curse you with the curse of the tribunal above and of the tribunal be