ANIMAL AND PLANT LORE. 373 



frequently recognized colors in the taste of various articles of 

 food. Sometimes she would say to her mother that this food 

 otherwise agreeable " tastes so very yellow that I can not eat it." 

 She was reproached for such eccentric notions, and finally out- 

 grew them. Now she is unable to recall any of these associations, 

 or to remember what substances formerly tasted yellow, and what 

 ones blue or green. 



I may close this discussion with a wise observation of Francis 

 Galton : " Persons who have color associations," he says, " are un- 

 sparingly critical. To ordinary individuals one of these accounts 

 seems just as wild and lunatic as another, but when the account 

 of one seer is submitted to another seer, who is sure to see the 

 colors in a different way, the latter is scandalized and almost 

 angry at the heresy of the former." 







ANIMAL AND PLANT LORE. 



By Mes. FANNY D. BEEGEN. 

 IV. 



ACCORDING to popular tradition, a surprising variety of 

 physical ailments or discomforts may be relieved by hu- 

 man saliva, used in compliance with certain explicit rules. Such 

 prescriptions abound both in our own day and in the pseudo- 

 medical literature of earlier ages, varying more or less in differ- 

 ent places and in different periods, but here an d there to-day we 

 find some interesting survival that tallies exactly with a super- 

 stition two thousand or more years old.* Many of these popular 

 prescriptions apparently are based entirely upon supposed cura- 

 tive virtues of human saliva, while others may more properly be 

 said to be directions for working, by means of spittle, spells or 

 charms, that are supposed to cure bodily disorders. 



So general do I find to be the belief that human saliva has 

 medical properties, that, desiring to be on the safe side before 

 ranking as out-and-out superstitions many very common customs 

 dependent upon this belief, I have consulted a number of trust- 

 worthy medical authorities in regard to the matter. The univer- 

 sal testimony is to the effect that there is not the slightest scien- 

 tific warrant for any prescriptions in which relief of pain is 

 promised on account of any specific remedial quality of spittle. 

 Warmth and moisture may be grateful to a burn, insect-bite, or 



* The present paper, which deals almost entirely with the uses of saliva in folk medi- 

 cine, forms only a part of a somewhat extended treatment of the subject of American 

 superstitions in regard to saliva which the writer hopes, at some future time, to present in 

 a more permanent form in connection with other folk lore. 



