136 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
1. A Shrew-Ash : — " At the south corner of the Plestor, or area, 
near the church [of Selborne], there stood," says Mr. G. White in 
his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (ed. 1813), " about 
twenty years ago, a very old, grotesque, hollow, pollard-ash, which 
for ages had been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew- 
ash. 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 it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted 
with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the 
limb. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, 
our provident fore-fathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, 
when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew- 
ash was made thus : — Into the body of the tree a deep hole was 
bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust 
in alive, and plugged in, no doubt, with several quaint incantations 
long since forgotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a con- 
secration are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, and 
no such tree is known to subsist in the manor, or hundred. 
" As to that on the Plestor, 
' The late vicar stubb'd and burnt it,' 
when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of the 
by-standers, who interceded in vain for its preservation, urging its 
power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been 
' Eeligione patrum multos servata per annos.' " pp 240-1. 
In The Natural History of Stafford-shire (by Eobert Plot, ll.d., 
1686) the author, having spoken of the occurrence of insects in 
the trunks of trees, says (ch. vi. pp. 222-3), " Yet more strangely 
than these have other Animals been found in the body of a tree 
somewhere near Biddulph, where two workmen sawing the body of 
a solid Oak, one of them at length perceived blood to follow the 
saw, whicli though it startled them not a little, yet resolving to goe 
on and see the issue, when they had cut to the end of the batt, 
they split asunder, and found the Saw had past through the body 
of a Hardishrew or Nursrow (as they here call them), i.e. a field- 
mouse, two others that lay by it escaping alive as soon as the tree 
was split, which being examin'd and found in all parts sound, the 
