INSECTlVOJx'A 95 



alone. Mr. Millais relates that Mr. F. J. Jackson^ 

 the well-known hunter and Sub-Commissioner in 

 British East Africa, recently told him, " that one 

 day when out hunting in Uganda, he passed, on a 

 native footpath, the dead body of a shrew. He just 

 observed it and passed on, but his gun bearer, a raw 

 native, immediately called his attention to the dimi- 

 nutive beast, thinking he had not seen it, and re- 

 marked, ' Do you know, master, that when that animal 

 crosses the human spoor it dies ? ^ ^' 



On the other hand, our ancestors believed that 

 the very touch of the tiny shrew^s foot brought all 

 kinds of evil upon the thing so touched. There was 

 but one escape from the doom which overshadowed 

 the " shrew-struck,^^ whether man or animal, and 

 that lay in the healing virtues of the branches of the 

 shrew-ash. Gilbert White^ describes the shrew-ash 

 which stood in his village. '^ At the south corner 

 of the plestor, or area near the church, there stood, 

 about twenty years ago, a very old, grotesque, hollow 

 pollard ash, which for ages had been looked on with 

 no small veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew- 

 ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently 

 applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve 

 the pains a beast suffers from the running of a shrew- 

 mouse over the part affected ; for it is supposed that 

 a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a 

 nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it 

 horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is affected 

 with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of 

 the use of the limb. Against this accident, to which 



* ' Natural History of Selborne/ Letter LXX. 



