BOURKE. ] NECKLACES OF HUMAN TEETH. 487 
The opinions entertained in Pliny’s time descended to that of the 
Reformation— 
Finger of birth-strangled babe, 
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab.! 
“Serofula, imposthumes of the parotid glands, and throat disexses, 
they say, may be cured by the contact of the hand of a person who has 
been carried off by an early death;” but, he goes on to say, any dead 
hand will do, ‘provided it is of the same sex as the patient and that the 
part affected is touched with the back of the left hand.’ A footnote 
adds that this superstition still prevails in England in regard to the 
hand of a man who has been hanged. 
The use of dead men’s toes, fingers, spinal vertebrie, etc., in magical 
ceremonies, especially the fabrication of magical lamps and candles, is 
referred to by Frommann.° 
Grimm is authority for the statement that in both France and Ger- 
many the belief was prevalent that the fingers of an unborn babe were 
“available for magic.”’* 
In England witches were believed to “ open graves for the purpose 
of taking out the joints of the fingers and toes of dead bodies 
in order to prepare a powder for their magical purposes.” ° 
Saint Athanase dit méme, que ces parties du corps humain [i.e., hands, 
feet, toes, fingers, ete.] étoient adorées comme des dieux particuliers.”® 
According to the sacred lore of the Brahmans ‘the Tirtha sacred to 
the Gods lies at the root of the little finger, that sacred to the Rishis in 
the middle of the fingers, that sacred to Men at the tips of the fingers, 
that sacred to Agni (fire) in the middle of the hand.”? 
In the Island of Ceylon ‘debauchees and desperate people often play 
away the ends of their fingers.”* 
Hone shows that “every joint of each finger was appropriated to 
some saint.”® 
NECKLACES OF HUMAN TEETH. 
A number of examples are to be found of the employment of neck- 
laces of human teeth. In my own experience I have never come across 
any specimens, and my belief is that among the Indians south of the 
Isthmus such things are to be found almost exclusively. I have found 
no reference to such ornamentation or “medicine” among the tribes of 
North America, but there are many to show the very general dissemina- 
tion of the custom in Africa and in the islands of the South Sea. 
Gomara says that the Indians of Santa Marta wore at their necks, like 
1 Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 4, scene 1. 
? Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. 28, cap. 11. 
3Tractatus de Fascinatione, Nuremberg, 1675, p. 681. 
4Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, p. 1073. 
6 Brand, Pop. Ant., vol. 3, p. 10. 
6 Montfaucon, |’ Antiquité expliqnée, vol. 2, liv. 4, cap. 6, p. 249. 
7 Vasishtha, cap. 3, pars. 64-68, p.25 (Sacred Books of the East, Oxford, 1882, Max Miiller’s edition). 
*'Travels of Two Mohammedans through India and China, in Pinkerton’s Voyages, vol. 7, p. 218. 
9 Every-Day Book, vol. 2, col. 95. 
