1914. Coi^GAN. — Folk-lore of Irish Plants and Anmials. 57 
pronounced Bo-three, Bore Tree, or Bottry, is used. In 
East Ireland, Elder is the name generally used. The 
reputation of this tree or shrub is uncertain. Though 
credited with an extraordinary number and variety of 
medical virtues, including the cure of rheumatism by merely 
carrying on the person a branch of the tree, it has in many 
places an evil repute and is said to be the tree on which 
Judas hanged himself. The grimmest belief associated with 
the tree is one I met with in Co. Dubhn, near Baldongan. 
I was driving here one day with the carman who introduced 
me to the She-Bulkishawn, when we passed a clump oi 
Elder in a hedge. " What do you call that tree ? " I asked 
him. " Oh, that's the Elder Tuff," he answered. " It's 
a bad thing to give a man a scelp of that. If you do, his 
hand'll grow out of his grave." 
The House Leek. — We are all familiar with the 
appearance of this plant on cottage roofs, and with the 
belief that it preserves the house from lightning and fire. 
This belief is an old one. Sir Thomas Browne mentions it in 
his Garden of Cyrus, published in 1658. How to secure 
the full benefit of the plant is not sufficiently well known. 
It was in 1897, when botanizing in Glen Inagh, in Conne- 
mara, where the plant is known as t)u^(i-<Mll a Uige, or the 
Boy of the House, that I first learnt how to make use of the 
plant. I was told that it had no effect at all in protecting 
a house unless it had been stolen from the previous owner, 
or, at all events, taken without his knowledge. If you were 
made a present of the plant it wasn't a bit of good. 
Animal Lore. 
Passing from these random notes on the folk-lore of 
plants, I come to the second division, that dealing with 
animals. My examples are taken chiefly from marine 
zoology, and the first, the Common Star -fish, Ur aster 
ruhens of science, suggests an interesting linguistic problem. 
On the Dublin coast at Skerries this species is commonly 
known by the Gaelic name Cfof^n, while some twenty 
miles south, at Dalkey, in the same county it is known as 
the CtAOfog. Why is the affix or termination an changed 
