NATURAL HISTORY 



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, would prove 

 ineffectual. Having occasion to enlarge my garden not 

 long since, I cut down two or three such trees, one of 

 which did not grow together. 



We have several persons now living in the village, 

 who, in their childhood, were supposed to be healed by 

 this superstitious ceremony, derived down, perhaps, 

 from our Saxon ancestors, who practised it before their 

 conversion to Christianity 1 . 



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 immedi- 

 ately relieve the pains which 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 



1 Much nearer to the metropolis than Selborne, and in days later than 

 those alluded to by White, the ceremony described by him has been prac- 

 tised. The ash resorted to for the charm, in the instance referred to, is 

 in the hedge of an orchard belonging to a house near Enfield, in which 

 some of my earlier years were spent : a man living in the neighbourhood, 

 and at the time when I was best acquainted with it (1810) about sixty 

 years of age, was indicated as the individual on whose behalf recourse 

 had been had to the observance. The tree had healed, and the cure had, 

 of course, been performed. 



Is it worth the remark that as ashes seem seldom to fail to grow toge- 

 gether after having been split, so also does it rarely happen that infants 

 affected with umbilical hernia fail to be relieved from it at a very early 

 age; and that, consequently, the charm-tree would, almost beyond the 

 probability of an exception, accord in its healing with that of the infant 

 whose fate was thus supposed to have been mysteriously connected with 

 it?-E.T. B. 



