150 WORLD-TREE OF THE ROMANS. Quippe aliter tunc orbe novo coloque recenti Juvenal, Sat. vi., 11. For when the world was new, the race that broke, Gifford. In another passage Virgil speaks of a sacred tree, the æsculus, in a manner which Grimm has noticed as strikingly suggestive of Yggdrasil : Esculus in primis, quæ quantum vortice ad auras Georg. ii., 291. Jove's own tree, High as his topmost boughs to heaven ascend, Dryden. Evidently these lines have a mythical import. The æsculus was a species of oak sacred to Jove; and in Greece the oak, as well as the ash, was accounted a tree from which men had sprung. The disguised hero of the Odyssey is asked to state his pedigree, since he must needs have one, "for," says the interrogator, "belike you are not come of the oak told of in old times, nor of the rock." The "ruminal fig-tree" seems to play a part in the legend of the foundation of Rome like that attri buted to the oak by the Greeks and to the ash by the Germans. Picus also has his share in the legend, for he helped the she-wolf to nourish the twins; and though Ovid does not tell us what kind of aliment he gave them, we may venture to surmise that he fed them with the mead which he himself loved so well, in like manner as the eagle in Crete fed the infant Jove with nectar, the equivalent of mead. The mythic characteristics of the ash help to explain some English superstitions, the true meaning of which appears to have been generally misunderstood. White says in his "Natural History of Selborne," "At the south corner of the area near the church there stood 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 shrewmouse 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 forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrewash was made thus: Into the body a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrewmouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration 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 area, 'the late vicar stubbed and burned it,' when he was waywarden, regardless of the remonstrances of the bystanders, who interceded in vain for its preservation." It is manifest that this practice was founded principally upon the supposed virtue inherent in the ash of neutralising every kind of venom. It is a tree that will tolerate nothing poisonous within its shadow, and wounds are cured with its sap. As to the insertion of the shrew-mouse within it, this may very probably have been done in accordance with a medical doctrine of great antiquity-the doctrine of sympathy. The spear of Achilles healed with one end of its ashen shaft the wound it had made with the other; it was a common practice, so common as to have given rise to a well-known proverb, to mix CREEPING THROUGH HOLES IN TREES, &c. 153 some hairs of a dog with the salve laid on the part he had bitten; and there have been famous leeches who cured sword wounds by applying their remedies, not to the patient, but to the weapon. "Fairies," says Grose, "sometimes shoot at cattle with arrows headed with flint stones; these are often found and are called elfshots. In order to effect the cure of an animal so injured, it is to be touched with one of those elfshots, or to be made drink the water in which one has been dipped." The venom of the shrew-mouse, neutralised by the sap of the ash, would co-operate with it in curing the injured limb to which the twigs were applied. A correspondent sent the following scrap from a newspaper to Notes and Queries, vol. v., p. 581:-"At Oldham, last week, a woman summoned the owner of a dog that had bitten her. She said she should not have adopted this course had the owner of the animal given her some of its hair, to ensure her against any evil consequences from the bite." There stood in the village of Selborne in Gilbert White's time "a row of pollard ashes, which,” he says, "by the seams and long circatrices 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, 154 CREEPING THROUGH HOLES IN TREES. while ruptured children, stripped naked, were pushed through the apertures, under a persuasion that by such a process the poor babies 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 part 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 ineffectual. 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." This mode of cure has not yet gone quite out of use in England, so far as the ash is concerned,* and it is still a practice much in vogue in the southern counties, when children are suffering from hoopingcough and some other complaints, to make them pass through the loop formed by a bramble which has taken root at both ends. This custom, and that of passing children and cattle through perforated * Children are still passed through a split ash for the cure of hernia, in Cornwall. "Choice Notes," p. 88. |