252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In Louisville, Ky., the children are afraid to kill the common 

 sow-bug (Oniscus), which they call " mad dog," believing that the 

 disagreeable-looking little crustacean can give one the hydropho- 

 bia. In my own mind there is a faint recollection of having 

 heard that a poultice made from these creatures possessed great 

 remedial powers of some kind. The genuineness of my half-ob- 

 literated reminiscence of the therapeutical value of the sow-bug 

 lately received an unexpected confirmation from the pages of a 

 copy of The Complete English Dispensatory, by John Quincy, 

 printed not far from the middle of the eighteenth century. This 

 rare old book, which had long lain among the unconsidered rub- 

 bish in the garret of an old-fashioned New Hampshire farm-house, 

 contains a vast amount of curious medical lore. Not a few of the 

 remedies which it describes are so alchemistically compounded as 

 to seem to have come straight down from the later adepts in that 

 pseudo-science. Other preparations, again, are unpleasant enough 

 in their composition to satisfy an ancient Roman or a modern 

 Chinese practitioner, as witness the following (by no means one 

 of the most objectionable) : 



" Expressio Millipedum Simplex (A Simple Expression of 

 Millipedes). — Take live millipedes and white sugar ana § iij, beat 

 them well together in a marble mortar, and pour upon them lb. j 

 of white wine, which strain out again by hard squeezing." 



This formula is quoted by Quincy from Dr. Fuller's Pharma- 

 copoeia Extemporanea as a diuretic. Among other synonyms for 

 " millipedes " as here used, Quincy gives " sows " and " onisci." I 

 find that Pliny recommends " millipedes " (which the editor of the 

 translation of the Natural History in Bohn's series identifies with 

 onisci) for pains in the ear. Holland is quoted in a foot-note in 

 the above-mentioned translation, as sanctioning the use of wood- 

 lice (sow-bugs) for pains in the ears ; and the editor also states 

 that English school-boys swallow them alive, and that old women 

 advise their use in consumptive cases. 



Perhaps every one has noticed the club-shaped, whitish mass 

 at the proximal end of a freshly pulled human hair. This root of 

 the hair, together with the attached connective tissue and adipose 

 material, is often absent, from the fact that the hair frequently 

 breaks off near the opening of the follicle, instead of coming out 

 entire from the interior of the latter. So it has come about that 

 the root of the hair is in different localities mistaken for an ani- 

 mal parasite, called a hair-eater. In many places in Maine and 

 Massachusetts, if these bulbs are noticed among combings, people 

 will say that the scalp is infested with hair-eaters, and that the 

 latter must be killed, or they will certainly ruin the hair. 



