FABLE AND FOLKLORE 185 



showered thick upon him, he interrupts the third mes- 

 senger with 'Out on ye, Owls! Nothing but songs of 

 death/ M 



It is not surprising on turning to the medieval phar- 

 macopoeia, where there was quite as much magic as 

 medicine, that the owl was of great potency in prescrip- 

 tions. "Thus the feet of the bubo, burnt with hard 

 plumbago, was held to be a help against serpents. If the 

 heart of the bird was placed on the left breast of a sleep- 

 ing beauty, it made her tell all her secrets: but the 

 warrior who carried it was strengthened in battle/' A ! 

 modern relic of this bit of superstitious therapeutics was 

 found by me in The Long Hidden Frietid, a. little book 

 printed at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1863, which was a 

 crude translation by George Homan of a German book 

 published at Reading, Penn., in 1819. It consists of a 

 long series of remedies and magic arts to be followed, 

 and which were actually in use in that region in cases of 

 disease. Some of them introduced birds, one of which 

 is reminiscent of the "sleeping beauty" mentioned a 

 moment ago, and reads thus: "If you lay the heart and 

 right foot of a barn-owl on one who is asleep, he will 

 answer whatever you ask him, and tell what he has done." 

 This should be known to our chiefs of police, whose de- 

 tectives appear to be wasting much time in applying the 

 extractive process called the Third Degree. 



The owl tribe, among the most innocent and service- 

 able, in its relation to mankind, of avian groups, has been 

 as outrageously slandered south of the Mediterranean as 

 north of it. "The inhabitants of Tangier," as Colonel Irby 

 tells us 81 in his book on the ornithology of Gibraltar, con- 

 sider the barn-owls, numerous there, "the clairvoyant 

 friends of the Devil." 



