ii4 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



Zanetti who reports this superstition also states that 

 some persons wear sacred vestments on such an 

 occasion ; but whether those persons are men or 

 women does not appear. Near Gubbio a barren 

 woman is frequently advised to draw off the first milk 

 of a goat, before the newborn kid is allowed to suck, 

 to make a cheese of it, and to wear the cheese tied up 

 in a rag continually under her clothes. 1 In all these 

 cases prolific virtue is communicated by contact. 



It is sometimes enough if not the woman herself but 



some article of her clothing be placed in contact with 



the fruitful object, as in a Bosnian custom by which a 



childless woman seeks for a plant called apijun, cuts 



its roots small, and steeps them in foam she has caught 



from a millwheel, afterwards drinking of the liquid. 



She then winds her wedding-girdle round a newly 



grafted fruit-tree, when, if the graft prosper, she also 



will bear. A still more complex rite is recommended 



when a woman has been married for upwards of 



eleven years without having had issue. A lady friend 



who is so fortunate as to be in that state in which 



" women wish to be who love their lords " must 



endeavour to find a stone lying in a pear-tree, as 



sometimes happens when it is thrown at the ripening 



fruit and caught by one of the branches. She must 



then shake the tree until the stone fall. This she 



must catch in her hands ere it reach the ground, carry 



it in the left skirt of her dress to the brook, put it 



into a pitcher, fill the pitcher from the brook so far as 



to cover the stone, and carry it home. Next, she 



gathers dewy grass (it is not stated what she does with 



it), and speaks into the pitcher and into the water the 



1 Zanetti, 104, 103. 



