Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/479

 Miscellanea. 457

savage. It is difificult to analyse the primitive notion underlying this, but it seems to me that the practice of biting off the ears and tails of puppies, which is, I believe, usually followed by breeders, and is familiar to me from prosecutions by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, may be connected with it, and that the dogs' masters may originally have eaten the dogs' ears to render themselves more savage. It cannot be too much enforced on those who cut the ears and tails of dogs in England that they are executing an imperfect rite. Let them perform it in full, or not at all !

Cutting off Donkeys' Ears. — I had a reference, which I have mislaid, to a police case in Ireland, where a farmer was charged with cutting off a donkey's ears because it had trespassed in his crops. This custom was, and I fear still is, very common in Greece and the Greek Islands. It is of course not a mere act of vengeance, but what notion lies at the root of the abominable cruelty I cannot conceive. W. R. Paton.

A gardener near Newport, Salop, cuts his cats' tails to keep them from trespassing in the woods. His predecessor cut one ear for the same reason. Frank Buckland {Curiosities of Natural History, 2nd Series, ch. ii.) explains that this may be partly effectual, by allowing the wet to penetrate into the ear, to the animal's annoyance. C. S. Burne.

At Cuzco, the ears of dogs used at funerals were cut off. — Int. Archiv.fiir Ethnog., viii., 144.

"Wenn die Kuh vom Bullen kommt, schneidet man ihr einen Schnitt ins Ohr; so wird sie tragend. (Mecklenburg.)" Wuttke, Der d. Volksaberglaube, 3rd Ed., § 698.

"Um den Hund vor Behexung zu schiitzen, haut man ihm den Schwanz ab. (Oldenburg.)"— Z^/^., § 680. N. W. Thomas.

Customs in the London Building Trade.

My little boy of four years old was taken one day lately to see the house now in building for us at Barnet. It had already been arranged that he should formally lay the date-stone when it was reaay, but he wanted to be allowed to help at once, so the work- men good-naturedly let him lay a brick. As he was leaving the