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ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



poison the chum. Or let us suppose that you start to pick a sliver out 

 of your finger with a pin and your grandmother catches you at it. You 

 know that she will insist that you use a needle. But why? For 

 20 years I have been asking grandmothers that question. They all 

 agree that one must use iron and not brass, but the two lame explana- 

 tions which they give can easily be shown to be inadequate. I 

 searched for years through the literature on folldore for information 

 on this point until at last I became convinced that the original reason 

 was that if iron is used it will keep the wicked elves away from the 

 wound just as iron over the door will keep them out of the house. 



Fiouai 1.— Christ, whose feet are seen at the left, is casting the devil out of the insane daughter of a poor 

 widow. This Illustration from the Biblica Pauponim shows how, as late as the fifteenth century, people 

 firmly believed that evils took possession of people and could be cast out bodily as shown in this illustra- 

 tion. 



When you use a brass pin you have no protection, and the wound may 

 fester. 



But some of you may ask: Why should the iron protect? Briefly, 

 it is because the elves and the old gods and demons were very conserva- 

 tive; so much so that for thousands of years they clung to the use of 

 the old chipped flint axes and knives of our cave-dwelling ancestors. 

 Eventually they got so that they could tolerate bronze, but even yet 

 they cannot abide nor even go near the newfangled iron which came 

 into use about 1000 B. C. 



Or, let us suppose that today, as a young mother sits trimming for 

 the first time her baby's nails, the grandmother comes in. Why 

 will she be so upset and why will she perhaps get down on the rug and 



