Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/676

658 It has often happened that substances as well as ceremonies, which originally had a religious signification, in later ages degenerated into fancied cures for disease; so, is it not more than probable that the employment of animal excreta as remedies among the less intelligent classes in different parts of Europe, in both earlier and later times, as well as in our own newest offshoot from the Indo European stem, is a survival of early Aryan religious observances? Many ignorant people in various parts of the United States today believe that a decoction made by steeping in water the manure of sheep is a sovereign remedy in measles, and very similar notions are found among the English and German peasantry. In one of Bale's "Interludes," published in 1562, in which various remedies for common ailments of the lower animals are recounted in quaint verse, the same substance is recommended as "wholesom for the pyppe." In that repertory of curious information, Brand's "Popular Antiquities," the following statement is quoted from a statistical account of County Stirling, in Scotland: "A certain quantity of cow-dung is forced into the mouth of a calf immediately after it is calved, or, at least, before it receives any meat; owing to this the vulgar believe that witches and fairies can have no power ever after to injure the calf." In Cumberland, England, a reputed cure for ear-ache is the application of a bit of wool from a black sheep moistened in cow's urine. Possibly it is a modified form of this latter notion that is found in the island of Mount Desert, where it is said that the wool must be wet in new milk; while in Vermont, to be efficacious, it is thought that the wool must be gathered from the left side of the neck of a perfectly black sheep. In other localities negro's wool is a reputed cure for the same pain. It seems almost incredible, whatever their origin, that remedies of so offensive a character as many of those above given can still retain a place even in the rudest traditional pharmacopoeia, but there seems to be in the uneducated human mind a sort of reverence for or faith in that which is in itself disagreeable or repulsive. This idea apparently rules instead of rational judgment in the selection of many popular household remedies in the shape of oils of most loathsome derivation, such as "skunk-oil," "angle-worm oil" (made by slowly rendering earth-worms in the sun), "snake-oil" of various kinds, etc. George Borrow, in that rare idyl of vagabondage, "Lavengro," tells of various encounters with an old herbalist who always carried on his back a stout leathern bag, into which he gathered not simples but vipers, whose oil he extracted for medicinal purposes. The faith of this wandering English mediciner and his numerous customers of half a century ago in the viper-oil is quite equaled to-day by that of American frontiersmen in the peculiar virtues of rattlesnake-oil. It is just possible that subtle remedial powers