Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/684

666 over each other on the ground, locked in spiteful embrace and uttering a rapid succession of shrill cries, which pierce the ears like needles of sound. It is a most fortunate circumstance that the larger animals are not so vindictively pugnacious as the moles and the shrews; for it would be a very hard case if we were unable to put two horses or two cows in the same field without the certainty of immediate fight, and the probability that one of the combatants would lose its life in the struggle."

The bite of such a little creature obviously need not be feared by a human being, though ancient prejudice attributes to it such venomous properties that in many districts in England the viper is no more dreaded than the shrew. Even the touch of the animal's tiny foot was believed to cause pains which could only be relieved on the "like cures like" principle.

The following curious account of this latter superstition is from Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selborne": "At the fourth corner of the Plestor, or area, near the church, there stood about twenty years ago a very old, grotesque, hollow pollard ash, which for ages had been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew ash. Now a shrew ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew mouse over the part affected; for it is supposed that a shrew mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue forever. A shrew ash was made thus: Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew mouse was thrust in alive and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten."

The shrew is often seen near reposing cattle, and this habit probably gave the chance for putting upon it any unexplained malady that the cattle might suffer. But it has been well suggested that the shrew goes to domestic animals for the insects which light upon them. From the fact that the shrew will eat one of its own species, if slain in battle, it is evident that insects and worms do not form its whole diet. "One of these little creatures," says Wood, "has been discovered and killed while grasping a frog by the hind-leg; and so firmly did it maintain its grasp, that even after its death the sharp teeth still clung to the limb of the frog. Whether the creature intended to eat the frog, or whether it was urged to this act by revenge or other motive, is uncertain."