378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fasting saliva being esteemed most efficacious. This popular mode 

 of alleviating the pain caused by the injection of the usually acid 

 secretion of insects is no doubt often made use of as being the 

 easiest or most convenient way to moisten and cool the smart, and 

 if the wound be instantly sucked with the lips, very likely the 

 poison may be in part withdrawn and relief thus obtained ; but 

 I am convinced, as the result of a good many inquiries among 

 peojile of various occupations and nationalities, that there is a 

 popular belief that human saliva is effective in palliating irri- 

 tating bites or stings of insects. It would not, perhaps, be easy to 

 prove, but I strongly suspect that there is some historical relation- 

 ship between our common custom of moistening such stings with 

 saliva and an ancient belief that human saliva had power to anti- 

 dote many animal poisons, and by its mere contact to destroy ser- 

 pents and various other dreaded and repulsive creatures. A few 

 superstitions that I have found show that this old belief still sur- 

 vives. In a previous paper I mentioned the New England notion 

 that if a snake should spit into a person's mouth it would surely 

 kill the latter ; and now from Maine comes the converse of that 

 superstition, viz., that if a human being spit into a snake's mouth 

 the reptile will quickly die. Quaint old Sir Thomas Browne, in his 

 Vulgar Errors, a book remarkable for the exposure of so many 

 fallacies current in the age in which it was written, expresses a 

 doubt, founded on experience, " as to whether the fasting spittle 

 of man be poison unto Snakes and Vipers," thus showing that this 

 was an old English belief. Pliny recommends fasting saliva as a 

 preservative against the poison of serpents ; and in another place 

 he writes : " But the fact is that all men possess in their bodies a 

 poison which acts upon serpents, and the human saliva, it is said, 

 makes them take to flight as though they had been touched with 

 boiling water. The same substance, it is said, destroys them the 

 moment it enters their throat, and more particularly so if it should 

 happen to be the saliva of a man who is fasting." Pliny cites 

 Marcion of Smyrna as authority for the statement that the sea- 

 scolopendra will burst asunder if spit upon, and that the same is 

 true of frogs and " bramble-frogs." Human saliva is popularly 

 believed by the Japanese of to-day to be a deadly poison to centi- 

 pedes. W. G. Black says that Galen believed that a scorpion 

 could be killed by a person's spitting. A gentleman whose child- 

 hood was spent near London, Canada, recalls a superstition of 

 that neighborhood to the effect that if one should spit on a toad's 

 back the creature would split open, precisely the same as the 

 belief which Pliny quotes from Marcion, save that in the Cana- 

 dian form of the fable the toad takes the place of the frog. In 

 the same locality in Canada children held that if a toad should 

 spit on a person warts would be the result, and this notion is 



