134 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
plastered with loam, and carefully swathed up. If the parts 
coalesced and soldered together, as usually fell out, when the feat 
was performed with any adroitness at all, the party was cured ; but, 
when the cleft continued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, 
would prove ineffectual. 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 cere- 
mony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who 
practised it before their conversion to Christianity." pp. 239-240. 
9. As practised in West Sussex : — 
Mrs. Latham, in her Monograph entitled Some West Sussex 
Superstitions lingering in 1868, Collected by Charlotte Latham, at 
Fittleworth, published in the Folk-Lore Record, vol. i. pp. 1-67, by 
the Folk-lore Society, 1878, says, speaking of "the following remedy, 
still in common use in many parts of Sussex, for the cure of rupture in 
children," "A child so afflicted must be passed nine times every morn- 
ing on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling 
ash tree, which has been so far given up by the owner of it to the 
parents of the child, as that there is an understanding it shall not 
be cut down during the life of the infant who is to be passed 
through it. The sapling must be sound at heart, and the cleft must 
be made with an axe. The child on being carried to the tree must 
be attended by nine persons, each of whom must pass it through 
the cleft from west to east. On the ninth morning the solemn 
ceremony is concluded by binding the tree lightly with a cord, and 
it is supposed that as the cleft closes the health of the child will 
improve. In the neighbourhood of Petworth some cleft ash trees 
may be seen, through which children have very recently been 
passed. I may add, that only a few weeks since, a person who 
had lately purchased an ash tree standing in this parish, intending 
to cut it down, was told by the father of a child, who had some 
time before been passed through it, that the infirmity would be sure 
to return upon his son if it were felled. Whereupon the good man 
said, he knew that such would be the case ; and therefore he would 
not fell it for the world." pp. 40-41. 
10. As practised at Hawstead in Suffolk : — 
A Provincial Glossary ; with a Collection of Local Proverbs, mid 
