Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/289

 MISCELLANEA.

On the 10th of February, 1854, Mr. Kinahan read before the Dublin Natural History Society a paper "On the Reproduction and Distribution of the Smooth Newt and a Notice of the Popular Superstitions relating to it." It was printed in The Zoologist at the time (vol. xii., p. 4355). I forward a transcript of the portion relating to folklore:—

"This brings me to the third part of my paper, namely, the superstitions connected with this animal. There are several of them curious and interesting, as having a connection with the religious belief of the former inhabitants of this country, and are now fast dying away. In almost every part of the country we find these animals looked on with disgust and horror, if not with dread. This arises from two superstitions; one of them, common to great part of Ireland, relating chiefly to the animal in its aquatic state, and which in the county of Dublin has earned for it the names of man-eater and man-keeper, though the dry ask of the county of Dublin, that is the animal in its terrestrial stage, is supposed to be equally guilty with the first mentioned, in the habit of going down the throats of those people who are so silly as either to go to sleep in the fields with their mouths open, or to drink from the streams in which the dark lewkers harbour. They are also said to be swallowed by the thirsty cattle; in consequence, the country people kill them whenever they meet with them on land, and poison the stream they are found in by putting lime into the cattle's drinking-pools. In either case the result is the same; the reptile taking up his quarters in the interior of his victim in some way, it would puzzle a physiologist to explain how it contrives to live on the nutriment taken by the luckless individual or animal, so that, deprived of its nourishment, the latter pines away; nay, so comfortable does the newt make herself, that