Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/784

764 this day practiced by the peasantry of various districts in England and Scotland, I will quote a few which are considered certain remedies. The Northumbrian cure for warts is to take a large black snail, rub the wart well with it, and then impale the poor snail on a thorn-hedge. As the poor creature wastes away, the warts will surely disappear.

In the west of England eel's blood serves the same purpose. For goître or wen a far more horrible charm must be tried. The hand of a dead child must be rubbed nine times across the lump, or, still better, the hand of a suicide. It is not many years since a poor woman living in the neighborhood of Hartlepool, acting on the advice of a "wise woman," went alone by night to an out-house where lay the corpse of a suicide awaiting the coroner's inquest. She lay all night with the hand of the corpse resting on her wen; but the mental shock of that night of horror was such that she shortly afterward died.

In the neighborhood of Stamfordham, in Northumberland, whooping-cough is cured by putting the head of a live trout into the mouth of the patient, and letting the trout breathe into the child's mouth. Or else a hairy caterpillar is put in a small bag and tied round the neck of the child, whose cough ceases as the insect dies.

A peculiar class of remedy is that of making offerings of hair as a cure for whooping-cough. In Sunderland, the crown of the head is shaved, and the hair hung upon a bush or tree, in full faith that, as the birds carry away the hair, so will the cough vanish. In Lincolnshire, a girl suffering from ague, cuts a lock of her hair, and binds it round an aspen-tree, praying it to shake in her stead. In Ross-shire, where living cocks are still occasionally buried as a sacrificial remedy for epilepsy, some of the hair of the patient is generally added to the offering. And at least one holy well in Ireland (that of Tubber Quan, near Carrick-on-Suir) requires an offering of hair from all Christian pilgrims who come here on the last three Sundays in June to worship St. Quan; part of the ceremonial required is that they should go thrice round a neighboring tree on their bare knees, and then each must cut off a lock of his hair, and tie it to a branch as a charm against headache. The tree, thus fringed with human hair of all colors, some newly cut, some sun-bleached, is a curious sight, and an object of deep veneration.

Travelers who remember the tufts of hair which figure so largely among the votive offerings in Japanese temples, may trace some feeling in common between the kindred superstitions of these Eastern and Western isles.

Hideous is the remedy for toothache practiced at Tavistock in Devonshire, where a tooth must be bitten from a skull in the church-yard, and kept always in the pocket.

Spiders are largely concerned in the cure of ague. In Ireland the sufferer is advised to swallow a living spider. In Somerset and