Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/188

176 their going mad." There is a curious correspondence between this recommendation of Pliny's and the following recipe for the "tear of a mad hound," found in an old Anglo-Saxon leech-book, written about the commencement of the eleventh century, entitled "Medicina de Quadrupedibus:" "Take the worms (thymas) which be under a mad hound's tongue (under thede hundes cunzan), snip them away, lead them round about a tig-tree, give them to him who hath been rent; he will soon be whole."

Allusion is made to this worm in a work called the "Kynosophian," supposed by some to have been written by Phæmon, while others attribute it to Demetrius Pepagomenos, a Greek writer residing at Constantinople in the twelfth century. In this book it is asserted that underneath the dog's tongue is a little body like a white worm, which must be quickly destroyed ere it increase and invade the whole throat. In the sixteenth century, Fracastorius, in a poem styled "Alcou, sive de cura Canum Venaticorum," refers to it in the following words: "Vulnificus vermis suffunditque ora veneno."

In more modern times, the Germans generally believed in it, terming it the Tollwurm, or worm of madness. So popular was the superstition, that, in the middle of the last century, there existed in Prussia an ordinance requiring all owners of dogs to submit them to this mutilation. The ordinance was rendered more specific by a royal decree of February 20, 1767, establishing a regular corps of operators, whose duty consisted in visiting semi-annually all houses containing dogs, "worming" every animal, and furnishing the master thereof with a certificate to that effect. The edict prescribed, likewise, that every dog should be so treated before it had become six months old, and persons violating the law were condemned to pay a fine of fifty Prussian crowns, or, in default thereof, to suffer an imprisonment of one month. In 1786 a similar law prevailed in Hanover. This so-called worm was explained by some to be a vein, whose absence in a dog menaced by hydrophobia leads to engorgement of the throat and immediate asphyxia. It was regarded by Morgagni and Heydecker, after careful examination, as a spiral tendinous arrangement peculiar to the canine race, having some connection with the genio-hyo-glossus muscle, and serving to facilitate the act of lapping. Other authorities, however, deemed it to be the duct of the submaxillary gland, and others still maintained that it was merely the frenum linguæ. The English author, Fothergill, in his celebrated treatise on Hydrophobia, remarked that nothing was definitely settled relative to the utility of the operation, but that the whitish vermiform substance thus removed was nothing else, it might be presumed, than the canal forming a portion of the salivary apparatus, whose destruction might possibly exercise some influence upon the secretion, in diminishing, to a certain, extent, the liquid which transmits the virus.

The whole theory, however, was substantially demolished in 1786,