SOME SUPERSTITIONS OF HYDROPHOBIA. 175 



heavens was a premonition of impending danger. It probably also had 

 some connection with the Kvvocpdvrcg eoprrj, a festival of the Argives 

 marked by the destruction of many dogs. In the " Iliad," Homer men- 

 tions Orion's dog as affecting human health disastrously. Pausanias, 

 in his " Travels in Greece," alluding to the story of Actaeon's destruc- 

 tion by his own hounds, was inclined to atti'ibute 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 influ- 

 ence, 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 enact- 

 ments 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 liber- 

 ated 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 pre- 

 ventive 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 



