MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXV, Issue 96, 22 April 1904, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES.

SURVIVAL OF THE BLACK ART. i Within the last few weeks there have been reported several remarkable cases of the survival of the black art of witchcraft and its practice in various parts of England even to-day. At Exeter, under the very shadow of the cathedral, a herbalist was convicted of obtaining money under false pretences. His fraud was the performance of incantations to free persons from the spells of evil spirits. In one case he was called upon to purge a bewitched room, which he did by scattering powder and repeating tbe Lord's Prayer. For this he charged and received £5. In a stabbing case at Essex Assizes last December it was stated in evidence that to quicken the healing of the wounds the knife with which they were inflicted was smeared with grease and put in the injured man's bed. The knife was oiled to prevent it from rusting, for mortification of the wound is supposed to follow the rusting of the instrument. At Blackburn, a month or two ago, a dog stealer pleaded in defence of his crime that the fat of a stolen dog was a cure for rheumatism. In this belief he had taken the animal and killed it to make an unguent. These recent eases occurring in widely separated parts of the kingdom show how strong is still the power of superstition over the minds of the people, despite the compulsory education of tlie last thirty years. In many an English village the wise woman is still more than a rival for the doctor, though he is skilled in the marvels of the X-rays and Finsen light cure. About Malton the Yorkshire rustics still believe in the virtues of a baked mouse as a remedy for whooping-cough, though trained nurses of the district association tend the sick in their homes. The value of this cure is said not to be in the mouse, but the cheese it had eaten. Whooping-cough has many and strange folk-cures. Soup made from mice tails is one. The sures. is to pass tbe suffering child three times under the belly and over the back of a donkey. A few years ago a correspondent stated in the "Lane, t" that one donkey in the county ( vas so famous for its remedial vht; .hat its owner supported himself aim a large family by the beast's earnings. He toured the district with his ass, crying. "Will any one come under my donkey for the chin cough?" When a Derbyshire clergyman's children had whooping-cough his coachman's wife brought little silk bags to be tied round the sufferers' necks, each bag containing hair cut from the cross of a donkey's back. In Somersetshire, treacle, turpentine and other ingredients are mingled together,-and the concoction rubbed into the whooping child's palms of the hands, soles of th* feet, and pit of the stomach four times a day. A mother, who had been a nurse in a large hospital, ironically tried this remedy. To her vast amazement her child's cough actually ceased under the treatment.