Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/298

272 col. 218, says that Buffon states in the fifth volume of his Natural History that women of the people have a singular superstition: those who are barren imagine that to have children, they must pass under the bodies of dead criminals hanging on the gibbet: and the writer adds further instances of cognate beliefs from Jacques Grevin's Imposture des Diables, one of which is connected with that notorious gallows-plant, the mandrake. Then, after quoting evidence of the use of a piece of the rope with which a criminal has suffered death, for the cure of quartan fever, colic, sciatica, and tooth-ache, he continues: "At Rome the people believed it to be an assured remedy for the most violent migraine (Pliny, lib. xxviii., c. 4). At the present time hanging is no longer employed by us, but we have still the expression: avoir de la corde de pendu, for all very fortunate chances, notably for luck at play."

Among the Wallachians there is an idea that people can be rendered bullet-proof by eating the heart of a young child. This superstition is also found on the Austrian side of the border, and a yet more cruel mis-belief probably gives rise to many of the atrocious crimes dealt with in our own law-courts. Among the English, as among the German speaking peoples, oral tradition, descending from time immemorial, teaches the ignorant and debased that certain cures are only to be effected by doing violence to a girl yet in her childhood.

The notion that the blood of a person who has undergone the last penalty of the law possesses healing qualities has arisen, it can scarcely be doubted, from the old reverence for blood as the very seat of life itself. Like milk, which is the vital fluid in another form, and like corn—the bread of life—on which the existence of nations emerging from savagery depends, it is sacred and wonder-working; as