choose what he will be. If you do not bias the child, the first that he meets on the street, or in his school, or among his companions, will begin the work of biasing, of impression, of education, of training; for this is a continuous process. Whether you will or not, it is something over which you have no choice. It is something that will be done either wisely and well, or unwisely and ill.—Minot J. Savage.
(2674)
Remainders Saved—See Conservation of Remainders.
Remains of Insects—See Insects of
Remote Times.
REMEDIES, STRANGE
There are many remedies, real or reputed for physical ills, but there is but one sovereign remedy for body, soul and spirit, namely, the life of God fully received into the human soul. In an article on "Strange Medicines," in the Nineteenth Century, Miss Cumming quotes a few of the healing spells which to this day are practised by the peasantry of various districts in Great Britain, and which are considered certain remedies:
The Northumbrian cure for warts is to
take a large snail, rub the wart well with it,
and then impale the snail on a thorn-hedge.
As the creature wastes away the warts will
surely disappear. In the west of England
eel's blood serves the same purpose. For
goiter or wen, the hand of a dead child must
be rubbed nine times across the lump, or,
still better, the hand of a suicide may be
substituted. In the vicinity of Stamfordham,
in Northumberland, whooping-cough
is cured by putting the head of a live trout
into the patient's mouth, and letting the
trout breathe into the latter. Or else a hairy
caterpillar is put into a small bag and tied
around the child's neck. The cough ceases
as the insect dies. Another cure for
whooping-cough is offerings of hair. In
Sunderland the crown of the head is shaved
and the hair hung upon a bush or tree, with
the full faith that as the birds carry away
the hair, so will the cough vanish. In Lincolnshire
a girl suffering from the ague cuts
a lock of her hair and binds it around an
aspen-tree, praying the latter to shake in her
sted. The remedy for a toothache at Tavistock,
in Devonshire, is to bite a tooth from a
skull in the churchyard and keep it always
in the pocket. At Loch Carron, in Ross-*shire,
an occasional cure for erysipelas is to
cut off half the ear of a cat and let the blood
drip on the inflamed surface. In Cornwall
the treatment for the removal of whelks or
small pimples from the eyelids of children
is to pass the tail of a black cat nine times
over the part affected. Toads are made to
do service in divers manners in Cornwall
and Northampton for the cure of nose-bleeding
and quinsy, while "toad powder,"
or even a live toad or spider shut up in a
box, is still in some places accounted as useful
a charm against contagion as it was in
the days of Sir Kenelm Digby. The old
small-pox and dropsy remedy known as
pulvis Ethiopicus, was nothing more nor less
than powdered toad. In Devonshire any person
bitten by a viper is advised to kill the
creature at once and rub the wound with its
fat. It is said that this practise has survived
in some portions of the United States,
where the flesh of the rattlesnake is accounted
the best cure for its own bite. Black,
in his "Folk Medicine," states that the belief
in the power of snake-skin as a cure
for rheumatism still exists in New England.
Such a belief is probably a direct heritage
from Britain.
(2675)
The following is the belief of Eastern Jews in very queer remedies:
For hoarseness and complaints of the
throat and air-passages an approved prescription
is to take a new plate, write on it
with ink the three mystic names compounded
of the Hebrew letters, "Ain, Yod, Aelph,"
"Vau, Teth," and "Teth, Yod, Koph"; then
wash them out with wine, and after adding
three grains of a citron used at the tabernacle
festival, drink the beverage. Fits,
epileptic, and ordinary, are treated after the
following fashion: The patient's head is
covered and a pious neighbor stands by the
bedside while the "practitioner" called in recites
this invocation: "In the name of the
Lord of Israel, in the name of the angel
Raphael, and in the name of the hosts of
heaven, and in the name of the One hidden
and concealed, I adjure you to quit the body
of So-and-So, the son of So-and-So, to quit
him at once and without doing him hurt; and
if you do not go, I curse you with the curse
of the tribunal above and of the tribunal be-
