Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 12.djvu/437

 us. xn. NOV. 27. 19.5.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Last May a young woman in East Somerset expressed sorrow to my daughter that a litter of kittens had been drowned by the farmer in whose house they had been born, as she was intending to send one of them to her home. A day" or two afterwards she said that she did not mind after all, as cats born in May were no good. She went on to say, " We know they always bring snakes into the house." This girl was prob- ably brought up amid many such beliefs, as I remember her grandfather telling me, when I asked him why he had killed a hedgehog, that tney stole apples ; that they rolled over them as they lay on the ground in the orchard, and carried them off on their quills ; that he had seen them do it ; and that they always chose the best apples.

A. T. M.

Cats are wise and queer creatures, and, as some folks say, carry their souls in their tails. A cat always selects a retired or dark spot to bring forth her young, and this, I have always understood, is because torn cats have a cannibalistic propensity to eat newborn kittens, and so the mother hides them. A cat knows quite well if these young are " not right " ; and if a newborn kitten begins " to pule " and continues wailing, she will eat it out of the way, her instinct telling her that it is already half dead.

Gats learn many queer tricks. One cat that I had would rush into the top room of the house where onions and other articles were stored, and start rolling an onion down three long nights of stairs to the basement, flying down each flight after she had started the onion, generally getting in advance to await its arrival, and then by a deft stroke with her paw starting it down the next flight, exhibiting the while real enjoyment. THOS. RATCLIFFE.

TREE FOLK-LORE : THE ELDER (US. xii. 361, 410). Folkard, who in his ' Plant- Lore ' devotes nearly five pages to the elder, connects the Huntingdonshire notion that household furniture, and especially cradle, should not be made of elder-wood, with the Danish belief in the Elder- mother, or Elder-woman, by whom all injuries done to the tree are avenged ; and refers to a tradition of a child who, being laid in an elder-wood cradle, was so dis- turbed by the persecution of this creature that it could get no rest. He has also a story of some Danish children whose breasts were sucked by some invisible person, presumably the Elder-woman, in

consequence of the room in which they slept being boarded with elder-wood. There is no reference in all this to a common belief that the Cross was made of elder, nor to the fact that " Judas Was hanged on an elder " (see ' Love's Labour 's Lost,' V. ii. ), though both beliefs ha\e doubtless contributed to the widespread superstition that it is a tree of evil omen. It ought to be added that it is also regarded as a tree of many virtues ; in Pact, there is no tree round which so much contradictory folk-lore has gathered.

C. C. B.

BARLEY AND BLINDNESS (US. xii. 380). Dans le texte auquel fait allusion MR. M. L. R. BRESLAR, il s'agit sans doute des troubles de la vue provoques par Fergotigme. Le seigle, qui en est la cause ordinaire, est inconnu, je pense, en Palestine, mais 1'orge et les autres cereales le transmettent egalement. Cette explication est confirmee par 1' indication complementaire du texte hebrai'que, celle de troubles dans la circula- tion du sang, car le premier effet de 1'ergo- tisme est d'agir sur la tunique musculaire des arteres.

Les prescriptions des rabbins auraient ainsi garanti leur peuplede 1'une des maladies dietetiques les plus redoutables du Moyen- Age, de celle qui, sous le nom de " feu Saint- Antoine," a ravage la Chretiente a cette epoque, autant et plus que la lepre elle-meme (Social England,' i. 530). Peut-on ajouter aussi que ce mal mysterieux s'expliquait alors, comme les autres epidemies, par l'empoisonnement des sources et des fontaines et que les Juife, generalement indemnes grace a 1'hygiene particuliere que leur conseillaient leurs traditions et que leur permettait leur richesse, etaient tout designes pour etre consideres comme les auteurs probables du mefait, et traites comme tels. P. TURPIN.

The Bayla, Folkestone.

There was a somewhat similar belief among the Romans. Pliny tells us, * Nat. Hist.,' xviii. 7 (14), 74, that at one time barley had been used for making bread, but was rejected as being unsuitable. In his days it was chiefly used for feeding horses. The Romans, it would seem, believed that barley actually degenerated into darnel and wild oats (see Conington's note on Virgil, Eclogue .v. 37), and darnel was supposed to affect the eyesight. A character in Plautus's ' Miles Gloriosus,' to show his disbelief in the evidence of his fellow -slave's eyes, remarks sarcastically : "I am surprised to

j find that you live on darnel when wheat is

'so cheap" (1, 321).