222 NATURAL HISTORY 
infirmities, on a suspicion of witclicraft, and, by trying 
experiments, drowned them in a horse-pond. 
In a farm-yard near tlie middle of this village stands at 
this day, a row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and 
long cicatrices down their sides, manifestly show that in 
former times they have been cleft asunder. These trees, 
when young and flexible, were severed and held open by 
wedges, while ruptured children, stripped naked, were 
pushed through the apertures, under a persuasion that, by 
such a process, the poor babes would be cured of their 
infirmity. As soon as the operation was over, the tree, in 
the suffering part, was plastered with loam, and carefully 
swathed up. If the parts coalesced and soldered together, 
as usually fell out, where the feat was performed with any 
adroitness at all, the party was cured ; but where the cleft 
continued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, would 
prove inefiectual. Having occasion to enlarge my garden 
not long since, I cut down two or three such trees, one of 
which did not grow together. 
We have several persons now living in the village, who, 
in their childhood, were supposed to be healed by this 
superstitious ceremony, derived down, perhaps, from our 
Saxon ancestors, who practised it before their conversion 
to Christianity.^ 
^ " Much nearer to the metropolis than Selborne," says Mr. Bennett, 
in a note to this passage, " and in days later than those alluded to by 
White, the ceremony described by him has been practised. The ash 
resorted to for the charm, in the instance referred to, is in the hedge of 
an orchard belonging to a house near Enfield, in which some of my 
earlier years were spent. A man living in the neighbourhood, and at 
the time when I was best acquainted with it (1810) about sixty years 
of age, was indicated as the individual on whose behalf recourse had 
been had to the observance. The tree had healed, and the cure had, of 
course, been performed." 
lie adds : — " Is it worth the remark that, as ashes seem seldom to fail to 
grow together after having been split, so also does it rarely happen that 
infants affected with umbilical hernia fail to be relieved from it at a 
very early age ; and that, consequently, the charm-tree would, almost 
beyond the probability of an exception, accord in its healing with that 
of the infant whose fate was thus supposed to have been mysteriously 
connected with it ?" — Ed. 
