/ Dublin Natural History Society. 4355 



states, as distinct species: — 1. The dry ask, or man-keeper ; and 2. The water-ask, 

 or arglogher, (the last manifestly the same word as dark lewker, which name, in some 

 parts of the County Dublin, is pronounced art looker). He mentions, for the purpose 

 of contradiction, two traditions connected with it as current in his time : — 1. That it 

 is poisonous ; and, 2. That it can live in the midst of fire. With respect to the popu- 

 lar name, I find some of the lower orders call both the dry ask and the water-ask man- 

 keeper or man-eater, while the names dark lewker &c. are restricted to the animal in 

 its aquatic state. In Scotland, the animal is also called dearc luachrach in Gaelic. 



" This brings me to the third part of my paper, namely, the superstitions con- 

 nected with this animal. There are several of them curious and interesting, as having 

 a connexion with the religious belief of the former inhabitants of this country, and 

 are now fast dying away. In almost every part of the country we find these animals 

 looked on with disgust and horror, if not with dread ; this arises from two supersti- 

 tions : one of them, common to great part of Ireland, relating chiefly to the animal 

 in its aquatic state, and which in the county of Dublin has earned for it the names of 

 man-eater and man-keeper ; though the dry ask of the county of Dublin, that is, the 

 animal in its terrestrial stage, is supposed to be equally guilty with the first-mentioued, 

 in the habit of going down the throats of those people who are so silly as either to go 

 to sleep in the fields with their mouths open, or to drink from the streams in which the 

 dark lewkers harbour ; they are also said to be swallowed by the thirsty cattle : in con- 

 sequence, the country people kill them wherever they meet with them on land, and 

 poison the stream they are found in by putting lime into the cattle's drinking-pools. 

 In either case the result is the same: the reptile taking up his quarters in the interior 

 of his victim in some way, it would puzzle a physiologist to explain how, it contrives 

 to live on the nutriment taken by the luckless individual or animal, so that, deprived 

 of its nourishment, the latter pines away ; nay, so comfortable does the newt make 

 herself, that not content with living by herself, she contrives to bring up a little family. 

 Often have I been, told of the man who got rid of a mamma newt and six young ones, 

 by the following recipe, which I am assured is infallible : — The patient must abstain 

 from all fluids for four-and-twenty hours, and eat only salt meats ; at the expiration 

 of that time, being very thirsty, he must go and lie open-mouthed over a running 

 stream, the noisier the better, when the newts, dying of thirst, and hearing the music 

 of the water, cannot resist the temptation, but come forth to drink, and of course you 

 take care they do not get back again. The dry ask, in addition to this bad character, 

 is also supposed to be endowed with the power of the ' evil eye,' — children and cows 

 exposed to its gaze wasting away. The Rev. J. Graves writes to me, that in Kil- 

 kenny it is looked on as ' a devil's beast,' and, as such, burnt. But to compensate in 

 some measure for its evil qualities, the dry ask is said in Dublin to bear in it a charm. 

 Any one desirous of the power of curing scalds or burns, has only to apply the tongue 

 along the dry ask's belly to obtain the power of curing these ailments by a touch of 

 that organ. In the Queen's County it is also used to cure disease, but in a different 

 way ; being put into an iron pot under the patient's bed, it is said to effect a certain 

 cure, though of what disease I am not quite clear. 



" The warty newt {Triton cristatus) rests solely on Mr. Templeton's authority. It 

 is an inhabitant of every part of England, and might naturally have been expected to 

 be found in Ireland ; it may yet perhaps be met with in the western wilds, where Mr. 

 Thompson has, from description, recorded the palmated newt (Lissotriton palmipes), 

 which has been found both in England and Scotland. It is recorded in the Catalogue 



