Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/384

 that he had known of cow-hairs turning into short, thread-like worms. He probably had seen either young specimens of Gordius or some other nematode worm in the barn-yard and also seen plenty of loose hair lying about and connected the two facts as cause and effect.

From the time when there was an unwavering belief in the existence of a jewel in a toad's head and faith in its great medical virtues to the present day, a good many queer notions have been propagated about toads and frogs. Farmers' boys from Maine to Indiana are often cautious about flinging stones at either toads or frogs, lest their death should "make the cows give bloody milk." Throughout New England the killing of a barn-swallow is believed to have the same effect. East and West, North and South, the common name of our fresh-water confervæ, "frog-spittle," very generally bears a literal meaning to the country boy or girl as well as to many grown-up persons. The teacher in country schools will not always find it easy to convince her pupils that this floating green scum is a mass of growing plants. It is a very common belief that the tails of tadpoles literally "drop off" as might a loose finger-nail. Boys appreciate sufficiently a frog's strong hold on life to say "he has seven lives." I have met several children who thought that the fungi known as "toad-stools" derived their name from their being an actual resting-place or shelter for toads. I do not, however, know that this idea has any extended range. Speaking of toads, I wonder if the wide-spread but erroneous belief, that the touch of a toad will produce warts, first came about from the accidental discovery that the secretion of the glands of the skin is very acrid? This might easily have been guessed from the alacrity with which a dog will drop a toad if he has by chance bitten one. But is it not more likely that the fallacy regarding the production of warts is a result of some such theory as the "doctrine of signatures"? This, you remember, led physicians, in the infancy of medicine, to adopt as remedies many herbs quite destitute of curative powers merely because of some external characteristic which, so the doctrine supposed, indicated the disease to be cured by the use of the several plants thus employed. For this and no other reason the little eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis) was enrolled in the early materia medica as a panacea for diseases of the eye. The rough coat of the toad would naturally suggest the idea of warts, and a single suggestion very easily grows into a theory, and a theory into a belief.

Some reputed remedies for warts may be in place just here. In Southern Ohio the children believe that the juice of the Osage orange (Maclura aurantiaca) will remove these disagreeable excrescences. In other parts of the same State the juice of the tiny creeping "milkweed" (Euphorbia maculata or E. humistrata) is said to be a certain cure for warts. This latter notion I also find common in many places both east and west of Ohio; while in Eastern Massachusetts the same curative quality is thought to be possessed by the milky juice of the