210 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that 

 he was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged 

 him to their village, subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally 

 burned him. A curious feature of these remedial rites is the mixture 

 of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it is 

 an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning 

 efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the village priests of 

 the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members of their flock. 

 In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of 

 Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of 

 the Yotiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and 

 Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church, 

 although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate 

 them, especially in times of public distress. - 



Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the 

 sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwell- 

 ing in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes 

 and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined 

 to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic, 

 and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon 

 with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The 

 supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and 

 the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked 

 fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen 

 child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures 

 are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out 

 of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, 

 in the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned 

 their child to death under the delusion that they were ridding them- 

 selves of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in 

 Ireland, where the victims are sometimes adults.* Not long since 

 Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most care- 

 ful nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents, 

 therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed 

 upon them, and when the boy was four years old they resolved to 

 have recourse to boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstand- 

 ing his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their 

 own Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments. 



Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states 

 that when, in 1850, he was in Loblau, a village of West Prussia, he 

 saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On inquiry he 



* See the case of Bridget Cleary, reported in Appletons' Popular Science Monthly for 

 November, 1895, p. 86. We may add that her husband, Michael Cleary, was tried for 

 murder and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. 



