Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/64

 56 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

with usages relating to the movement of the sun, in some house- holds still regulating the making of bread and the methods of other domestic work. The second volume will appear equally instructive. As an illustration may be noted the chapter on " Amulets and Spells."

Well-known is the superstition, prevalent chiefly in the Southern States and apparently of negro origin, that good fortune is secured by wearing as an amulet the foot of a rabbit. The belief has a char- acter tending toward mystery and horror ; the foot is to be the left hind foot ; it is to be taken from a rabbit killed in a graveyard. Such requirement might make us suppose that the root of the super- stition is in that inclination to ascribe mystic power to the reverse of the bright side of life which appears in European magic ; the enchanter may secure his effects by setting night against day ; dia- bolical agency acts in the inverse manner of the angelic. Such conception appears frequently in modern popular superstition ; thus, in Halloween usages, it is common to perform the act of divination by walking backwards, or by hanging the garments wrong side out. According to one formula, a girl is to go into a garden at midnight of Halloween to steal cabbages ; the first person she meets on her return will be her husband. A variant insists that she must go through a graveyard ("Current Superstitions," vol. i. p. 56). The addition has probably been made merely to secure the conditions for awe. So with the rabbit superstition : the root is to be found in the power exercised by the member, and the connection with the grave is superadded. Mole-paws also may serve the purpose. If the rab- bit superstition is of negro derivation (and this is not absolutely cer- tain), at any rate it does not essentially differ from the conceptions of whites ; it is only a branch of the practice of attributing super- natural power to the desiccated member which had once been potent, of which we have a familiar example in the dried human hand, as in the case of the hand of a malefactor, used by thieves. The folk-lore of the English in America supplies a series of similar credulities with regard to the potency of the preserved parts of other animals. We cite from the volume under examination : —

AMULETS.

1. For cramps wear a bone from the head of a cod. Newfoundland.

2. A fin-bone of the haddock (if the fish is caught without touching the boat) will cure cramp. Green Harbor, Trinity Bay, N. F.

3. A fin-bone of the haddock, taken from the living fish without the knowledge of other persons, and worn in a bag, will cure toothache.

Labrador, Trinity Bay, N. F. (Mountain Indians).

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