I02 SORICID^— SOREX 



killed, hanging so that neither then nor afterwards she 

 may touch the ground, doth help those which are grieved 

 and pained in their bodies, with sores called fellons, or 

 biles, which doth pain them with a great inflammation, so 

 that it be three times invironed or compassed about the 

 party so troubled. The Shrew which dyeth in the furrow 

 of a Cart-wheel, being found and rowled in Potter's clay or 

 a linnen cloth, or in Crimson, or Scarlet woolen cloth, and three 

 times marked about the Impostumes, which will suddenly swell 

 in any man's body, will very speedily and effectually help and 

 cure the same. 



" The tail of a Shrew being cut off and burned, and after- 

 wards beaten into dust, and applyed or anointed upon the sore 

 of any man, which came by the bite of a greedy and ravenous 

 Dog, will in very short space make them both whole and 

 sound, so that the tail be cut from the Shrew when she is alive, 

 not when she is dead, for then it hath neither good operation, 

 nor efficacy in it." 



And again : — " There is a very good remedy against the bit- 

 ings of Shrews, or to preserve Cattle from them, which is this ; 

 to compass the hole wherein she lyeth round about, and get her 

 out alive, and keep her so till she dye, and wax stiffe, then 

 hang her about the neck of the Beast which you would preserve, 

 and there will not any Shrew come near them ; and this is 

 accounted to be most certain." 



The use of a well-known ancient antidote to these imagined 

 injuries has now passed away ; it consisted in the application 

 of a twig of a shrew-ash, of the preparation of which Gilbert 

 White ^ gives the following account : — 



"At the south corner of the Plestor, or area, near the 

 church, there stood, about twenty years ago, a very grotesque 

 hollow pollard-ash, which for ages had been looked on with no 

 small veneration as a shrew-ask. Now a shrew-ash is an ash 

 whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of 

 cattle, will immediately 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 



' Letter xxviii. to Daines Harrington, 8th January 1776. 



