564' Some remarkable Vulgar Prejudices 



dread : far from considering it as a friendly monitor, whose 

 approach forewarns them of the coming storm, they absurdly 

 imagine that it possesses the power of raising the tempest, 

 and delights in overwhelming in the depths of ocean the help- 

 less wanderers of the deep. " As well might they curse the 

 midnight lighthouse, that starlike guides them on their watery 

 way, or the buoy that warns them of the sunken rocks below." 

 ( Wilson.) 



The curing of Rupture in Children was formerly attempted 

 by passing the affected children, naked, through the two split 

 portions, held open by a wedge, of young living ash trees. 

 For the details, see White's Natural History of Selborne, letter 

 to Daines Harrington, dated Jan. 8. 1776. [See also Mr. 

 Bree, in the preceding communication, in p. 557., where he 

 relates a recent instance of the practical observance of this 

 superstition.] 



The Field Shrew {Shrex ardneus) was formerly accused of 

 injuring horses, either by biting or running over them ; and 

 whenever a horse in the field was seized with numbness in the 

 limbs, he was immediately judged by the old farriers to be 

 either planet-struck or shrew-run. The mode of cure they 

 prescribed, and considered as in all cases infallible, was to 

 drag the animal through an arch of a bramble, formed by a 

 shoot which had rooted into the ground at the extremity : a 

 method, I am told, formerly practised, and even now occasion- 

 ally made use of, for the purpose of curing children of the 

 hooping-cough, [See Mr. Bree in p. bSQ.'\ Another mode 

 of curing shrew-run animals was applying gently to the part 

 of them affected the twigs or branches of a shrew- ash. Re- 

 specting this superstition, and the mode of constituting a shrew- 

 ash, see White's Natural History of Selhorne, in the letter 

 before cited. The shrew-ash at Selborne seems to have been 

 cut down about the year 1758; so that we may refer the 

 superstition relative to it to the time when bezoar stone [see 

 IV. 285.], theriace, unicorn's horn, and bone of a stag's 

 heart pounded small, were held in high repute for curing 

 disorders. 



The more we look into the present subject, the more objects 

 yte find against which superstition and folly have directed 

 their deadly shafts ; and were I to bring forward all those 

 animals which, from the earliest records, have been so unfor- 

 tunate as to fall into this class, I must trespass still farther 

 upon the space of the Magazine, and the reader's time. I 

 would incidentally add, in relation to Mr. Farmer's notice of 



Superstitions connected with the Magpie^ in V. 210., that I 

 have never heard this bird styled either piannet or pianne : 



