1 96 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



LETTER XXVII I. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, Jan. %tk, 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 ; and, 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, 



