PRACTICES TO OBTAIN CHILDREN 47 



esteemed as a philtre, and is believed to grow upon 

 the ground beneath which a dead man lies, just as the 

 mandrake was believed to grow beneath the gallows. 1 

 The significance of this will appear by-and-by. 



Animal substances of various kinds are taken with 

 intent to obtain children. An insect in India called 

 ptllai-ptichcki , or son-insect, is swallowed in large 

 numbers by women in the hope of bearing sons. 2 

 Kamtchatkan women who wish to bear eat spiders. 3 

 To this day, in Egypt and the Eastern Soudan, the 

 scarab, which was sacred among the ancient Egyptians, 

 is " dried, pounded, and mixed with water, and then 

 drunk by women, who believe it," we are told, " to be an 

 unfailing specific for the production of large families. 1 ' 4 

 The women of the Lkungen, one of the British 

 Columbian tribes, drink a decoction of wasps' nests, or 

 of flies insects both of which lay many eggs. 5 Among 

 the Southern Slavs, the wife who desires offspring 

 places a wooden bowl full of water beneath a beam of 



1 For further details about the mandrake and other plants to 

 which similar beliefs attached, see Internat. Arch. vii. 81, 199; viii. 

 249 ; xii. 21 Hertz, Die Sage vom Giftmddchen (Abhandl. k. bayer. 

 Acad. Wiss. 1893), 76; De Gubernatis, op. cit. ii. 213; T. W. 

 Davies, Magic Divination and Demonology among the Hebrews, 

 London [1898], 34; and Prof. Starr's article already referred to. 

 Certain roots are also held by the Pawnees of North America to be 

 transformations of a primitive race of giants destroyed by Tirawa, 

 the head of the tribal pantheon. These roots are in the shape of 

 human beings. They are possessed of curative powers, and for that 

 purpose are dug up with ceremonies, incantations, and an offering 

 of tobacco-smoke (Dorsey, Pawnee Myth. i. 296). A similar (perhaps 

 the same) root was known and prized among the Algonkins 

 (Charlevoix, vi. 24). 



2 Panjab (Indian) N. and Q. iv. 107 (par. 415). 



3 Ploss, Weib, i. 432, citing Krashneninnikov. 



4 Budge, Egypt. Magic, 39. 



5 Boas, Rep. N. W. Tribes, in Rep. Brit. Ass. 1890, 5-7 7,.; 5$ i. 



