216 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



detection of the culprit in the person of the communal shepherd, a 

 man twenty-six years old, who on examination confessed that he, 

 with the aid of two accomplices, had committed the disgustful deed. 

 His object, he said, was to procure a tooth and the liver of a dead 

 person. He intended to pulverize the tooth and after mixing it with 

 snuff to give it to his brother-in-law in order to poison him. On 

 perceiving, however, that the body was that of a woman, he did not 

 take the tooth, because it would have no power to kill a man; but 

 he cut out the liver for the purpose of burying it in a field where the 

 sheep were pastured, and thus causing the death of the entire flock 

 in case he should be superseded by another shepherd, which he 

 feared might happen. All three were condemned to hard labor in 

 Siberia. 



It is a quite prevalent notion that if any part of a corpse is 

 concealed in a house, the inmates will have the corresponding bodily 

 organs affected by disease and gradually paralyzed. A drastic ex- 

 ample of this superstition occurrred in May, 1875, at Schwetz, a 

 provincial town of West Prussia, where a woman named Albertine 

 Mayevski became the mother of a male child, which died soon after 

 its birth. The father, to whom she was betrothed, refused to marry 

 her, and to punish him for this breach of promise she disinterred the 

 body of her babe, cut off its right hand at the wrist and the genitals, 

 and hid them in the chimney of the house of her faithless lover, 

 hoping thereby to cause the hand, with which he had pledged his 

 vow, to wither away, and to render him impotent. All this she freely 

 confessed when brought to trial, and was sentenced to two months' 

 imprisonment. But such relics of the tomb are used, on the principle 

 of similia similibus, not only for inflicting injury, but also for bring- 

 ing luck. Thus members of the " light-fingered craft " carry with 

 them the finger of a corpse in order to enhance their skill, success, 

 and safety in thievery; if the finger belonged to an adroit thief or 

 a condemned criminal its talismanic virtue is all the greater. It is 

 also believed that a purse in which a finger joint is kept will con- 

 tain an inexhaustible supply of money. The finger of a murdered 

 man is greatly prized by burglars because it is supposed to possess 

 a magic power in opening locks. The records of criminal courts 

 prove that these absurd notions are generally entertained by common 

 malefactors in East Prussia, Thuringia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Poland. 

 A candle made of fat obtained from the human body is very fre- 

 quently used by thieves on account of its supposed soporific power, 

 since with such a taper, known in Germany as Diebslicht or Schlum- 

 merlicht (sloom-light in provincial English), they are confident of 

 being able to throw all the inmates of the house into a deep sleep, and 

 thus rummage the rooms at will and with perfect impunity. The 



