Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/187

Rh heavens was a premonition of impending danger. It probably also had some connection with the Κῦνοφόντις έορτή, a festival of the Argives marked by the destruction of many dogs. In the "Iliad," Homer mentions Orion's dog as affecting human health disastrously. Pausanias, in his "Travels in Greece," alluding to the story of Actæon's destruction by his own hounds, was inclined to attribute the myth to the circumstance that the season had caused the pack of the famous hunter to run mad. Pliny remarks, in his "Historia Naturalis," that "canine madness is fatal to man during the heat of Sirius, and proves so in consequence of those who are bitten having a deadly horror of water. For such reason, during the thirty days that this star exerts its influence, we try to prevent the disease by mixing dung from the poultry-yard with the dog's food, or else, if he is already attacked with the disease, by giving him hellebore." From the time of Pliny until quite recently the development of rabies by summer heat has been accepted as a fact among scientific men, and the idea has become too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be easily eradicated. Only within the present century has it been proved conclusively by critical inquiry that no season of the year is specially concerned in the production of this formidable affection. Hence the absurdity of legislative enactments designed as precautionary measures against hydrophobia, and operative only during the summer months.

Our old and esteemed friend Pliny is responsible for several other very remarkable statements with regard to the dog. He asserts gravely that dogs will run from any one having, a dog's heart about him, and will never bark at a person who carries a dog's tongue in his shoe under the great toe, or the tail of a weasel which has been liberated after being deprived of that appendage. Among various absurd preventive means which he recommends, as efficacious in the case of a person bitten by a mad dog, is, to insert into the wound ashes of hairs from the tail of the animal which inflicted the injury. Hence the half-sick reveler, as he imbibes his morning potation, assures himself of its curative effect in the remark that he is taking "a hair of the dog that bit him."

The same author informs us of a belief common among the Romans, that a dog which laps the milk of a woman who has had a male child will never become rabid.

Another singular tradition, handed down from remote antiquity, but popularized by Pliny, is the idea that beneath the dog's tongue is situated a worm whose existence encourages the development of hydrophobia, and whose extirpation in puppyhood is an infallible preventive of the disease. He thus alludes to it: "There is in the dog's tongue a small worm known as 'lytta' among the Greeks. If this be removed from the animal while a pup, it will never become rabid or lose its appetite. This worm, after being carried thrice around a fire, is given to persons who have been bitten by a rabid dog, to prevent