108 ANTIDOTES AND INCANTATIONS. 



In view of these facts it is not strange that parts of the serpent should 

 be regarded of value as a specific against the poison of its own bite. 

 Similia similibus curantur — hair of the dog cures the bite — is a precious 

 doctrine in the old pharmacopoeia, and one handed down from savagery, 

 I fancy. Thus, according to the Spanish historians, the Opatas, a Mexican 

 race, took this plan when one of their people was bitten : Seizing the rep- 

 tile's head between two sticks, the unfortunate Indian would stretch the 

 creature out and bite it along the body ; whereupon, as in Goldsmith's 

 poem of the hero of Islington, the man recovers of the bite, the snake it 

 is that dies. New England tribes prescribed a powder from the serpent's 

 cast skin, the Delawares and Chippeways rubbed its fat into the wound, 

 and the Pot'awatamies kept the fang about them as a sure charm 

 against the bite. 



As this chapter would be made far too long by discussing the effects 

 of crotalus venom upon the vital system, so it must omit the matter of 

 antidotes further than to allude to the fact that many plants have been 

 regarded as efficacious, the reason, apparently, being that something about 

 them bore a fancied resemblance to a serpent (e. g., the root of the black- 

 snake wood), which convinced the credulons old herbalists that the plant 

 was manifestly designed by Providence for this purpose. Thus Du Pratz, 

 in his "History of Louisiana" (vol. ii, p. 43), describes the curative power 

 of the " rattlesnake herb" — apparently the same from which I drew an 

 "argument" in earlier pages — saying of it, that "when the head is ripe it 

 will, when shaken, give the same sound as the tail of a rattlesnake, which 

 seems to indicate the property of the plant." 



In the far West various local plants possess this beneficent distinction, 

 and to some of them deers and bisons are said to resort for healing; but 

 I disbelieve it, and notice that the Indians hold the snake in the greatest 

 terror despite the herbs. The Nishinams of California, indeed, seek super- 

 natural protection against bites during the ensuing season by a sportive 

 ceremony that takes place every spring. Among the Pomos, another once 

 powerful tribe of northern California, an annual ceremony of the direst 

 import was gone through with by the men on purpose to frighten and 

 properly subjugate their women. The personation of devils and their 

 doings was enacted in every way, and the whole affair wound up by a 

 grand oration from the venerable peace-chief — a sort of high-priest of the 

 tribe — in which he brandished full in the faces of the squaws a rattle- 

 snake held in his hand, threatening supernatural ills if they failed in 

 chastity and obedience, until many of them fell in a swoon of terror. 



This powerful effect is obtained through their religious notion of 



