Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/258

246 with lameness or soreness wherever the mouse sets down one of its little feet. Serious disability often comes from the touch of the ''og mouse.'nowiki> In some extreme cases the affliction is well-nigh incurable, and may last a lifetime. My old friend said that it was no hearsay matter with him. He had ' seen 'og mice both in Northamptonshire and 'ere in Hamerica.' One of his colts l was disabled by a 'og mouse running hover it, and was a long, long time getting well.' A striking peculiarity of the hog-faced mouse, according to my old friend, is, that it is never seen at rest, but always ' on a dead run,' as if fleeing from pursuit."

It seems to me almost certain that this redoubtable ''og mouse' is merely a shrew, whose long and pointed snout might suggest the visage of a hog. In Great Britain the most maleficent powers are commonly attributed to shrews, and an interesting passage concerning the matter in White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne deserves to be quoted verbatim: "At the south 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 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 baleful 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. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to subsist in the manor or hundred."

It appears that similar powers for evil have also been attributed, in parts at least of Great Britain, to field mice, which by creeping over the backs of sheep were thought to produce paralysis. The remedy for such an injury was to inclose the mouse in a tree, and stroke the afflicted animal with its branches as above described. How far, if at all, these old-country superstitions have become naturalized among us I do not know.

The belief that the American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatus) can at will "shoot" its quills is one of wide acceptance among unscientific people. I remember the woodcut in my first spellingbook, labeled porcupine, and how, in reply to my questions in