196 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE., 
LEP. ix Vv et, 
TO THE SAME. 
SELBORNE, Yan. 8th,-1776. 
DEAR SIR,—It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off 
superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in, as it were, with our 
mother’s milk ; and, growing up with us at a time when they take 
the fastest hold and make the most lasting impressions, become so 
interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense 
is required to disengage ourselves from them. No wonder, there- 
fore, that the lower people retain them their whole lives through, 
since their minds are not invigorated by a liberal education, and 
therefore not enabled to make any efforts adequate to the occasion. 
Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on the 
superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected of 
exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this enlightened 
age. 
But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well to re- 
member, that no longer ago than the year 1751, and within twenty 
miles of the capital, they seized on two superannuated wretches, 
crazed with age, and overwhelmed with infirmities, on a suspicion 
of witchcraft; amd, by trying experiments, drowned them in a 
horse-pond. 
In a farm-yard near the middle of this village stands, at this day, 
a row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and long cicatrices 
down their sides, manifestly show that, in former times, they have 
been cleft asunder. These trees, when young and flexible, were 
severed and held open by wedges, while ruptured children, stripped 
naked, were pushed through the apertures, under a persuasion that, 
by such a process, the poor babes would be cured of their infirmity. 
As soon as the operation was over, the tree, in the suffering part, 
was plastered with loam, and carefully swathed up. If the parts 
coalesced and soldered together, as usually fell out, where the feat 
was performed with any adroitness at all, the party was cured ; but, 
where the cleft continued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, 
