The Funny Side of Physic Part 42

[Ill.u.s.tration: GATHERING THE MANDRAKE.]

A favorite mode of uprooting this coveted plant--because of its defensive properties, when once gained--was to fasten cords to a dog's neck, thence to the base of the stem of the plant, and sealing their own ears with wax to prevent hearing the groans, which was death or madness, they whipped the unfortunate dog till he drew out the roots, or was killed in the attempt; for the dog usually died then or soon after the cruel beating, and the shrieks of the mandrake were supposed to have caused his death.

The Scabious, or "Devil's bit," was regarded with great superst.i.tion. "The old fantastic charmers," said the quaint Gerarde, "say that the Devil bit away the greater part of this root for envy, because of its many virtues and benefits to mankind." Dr. James Smith (1799) as quaintly observes, "The malice of the Devil has unfortunately been so successful, that no virtue can now be found in the remainder of the root or herb."

_House Crickets._--The superst.i.tion respecting these cheerful and harmless little _chirpers_ is remarkable. Some consider their presence a lucky sign, others their absence more fortunate. To kill one, with some persons, is a sign of death in the house. Very strange! They, blind fools, do not see that the saying originated in the death of the poor little cricket.

The following very remarkable occurrence was related to the writer, as having actually taken place at Providence, R. I., a few years since. Mrs.

D., a respectable lady, residing in the city, was reported to have been followed about the house and up stairs by a "cricket,"--a wooden one, used for a foot-stool. People called at her residence to inquire into the truth of the matter; others even requested to see the remarkable phenomenon of a cricket or stool walking off on all fours, until the lady became so annoyed by the continual stream of credulous callers, that she inserted a notice in the city journals denying the truth of the strange rumor. It was supposed to have started from some neighbor's seeing or hearing a house cricket when on a visit at the lady's house.

_The Bowing Images._--A still more amusing story is related respecting the two images surmounting the wall each side of the gate at the residence of Professor Gammel, of Providence. A report became current among the school-boys of the city, that when the images _heard_ the clock strike nine in the forenoon they bowed their heads. My informant said it was no unusual thing to see a dozen boys waiting, with books and slates, in front of the professor's gate, to see the images bow at nine. Being late at school, the teacher would inquire,--

"Where have you been lingering, that you are behind time at school?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WAITING TO SEE THE IMAGES BOW".]

"Been down to Professor Gammel's, waitin' to see the images bow."

Then the teacher drew his ferule or rod, and made them "bow" in submission to a smart whipping--a sequel antic.i.p.ated by the older scholars who inst.i.tuted the story.

_House Spiders._--Was there ever a child who was not taught, directly or indirectly, that house spiders were poisonous,--that their bite was instantaneous death? Was there ever a greater mistake? Many people have a superst.i.tious terror of these harmless creatures. The bite of spiders is only poisonous to those insects which the divine economy seems to have created for them to destroy. It is possible, as by a fly, sometimes for a slight skin inflammation, less than a mosquito's bite, to follow the sting of a spider on a very small child.

Let me hereby disabuse the public mind of the repugnance or horror with which these little creatures are regarded. The Creator has evidently placed them here for the destruction of flies and other insects, which otherwise would completely overrun us. The fly is such a domestic creature, that he soon deserts a house where the family is long absent.

The spider then removes also. (I have watched this proceeding, with no little interest, in the absence of my own family.) Therefore the spider was created to suppress a superabundance of insect life. When I have before stated this fact, the listener has been led to inquire why the flies were then made. We will not answer the suggestion of this "riddle"

as the Irishman did (you know that he said, "To feed the spiders, to be sure"), but reply, that if this question is to arise in this connection, we may as well keep on our inquiry till we arrive at the greater riddle, "Why are _we_ created?"--to which we have no s.p.a.ce for reply.

It is said that manufacturers of quill pens in London, being greatly annoyed by a species of moth which infests their quills and devours the feathers, and the common spider being endowed with an inordinate appet.i.te for those same moths, the penmakers and spiders are on the best of terms, and an army of these much-maligned and persecuted insects encamp in each pen factory, and do good service to the cause of literature as well as trade, by protecting the quills. We may yet find that even mosquitos and bedbugs have their uses in the wise economy of nature.

Now, when tidy housewifery requires that brush and broom should ruthlessly demolish the webs,--the wonderful work and mechanism of the one species of house spider,--let it be done as a necessity, not with a feeling of repugnance to the harmless little insect; and let children be taught the truthful lesson that nothing is made in vain.

_The House Cat_, with many, is regarded with unaccountable superst.i.tion.

It goes with the witch, particularly the black cat. No witch ever could exist without one. This is usually the species that haunts naughty boys in their dreams after they have eaten too heartily of cake, and other indigestible stuff, at evening.

Cats are as old as time. At least their existence dates back as far as man's in history, and they were formerly regarded as a sacred animal.

In ancient Egypt we find that Master Tomas, with his round face and rugged whiskers, symbolized the sun. Preserved in the British Museum are abundant proofs of the reverence and superst.i.tion with which the feline race was regarded by the Egyptians. Here several of these revered Grimalkins are mummied in spices, and perfumes, and balsams, in which they have survived the unknown centuries of the past, "to contrast the value of a dead cat in the land of the Pharaohs with the fate of such relics in modern times, ignominiously consigned to the scavenger's cart, or feloniously hanging upon a tree, the scarecrow of the orchard."

Diodorus, the Greek writer, 1st century B. C., informs us that such was the superst.i.tious veneration with which the Egyptians regarded cats, that no one could ruffle the fur of Tom or Tabby with impunity, and that any man killing a cat was put to death. (O, what a country it must have been to sleep in!) In Ptolemy's time, while the Roman army was established in Egypt, one of the Romans killed a cat, when the people flew to his house, and dragged him forth, and neither the fear of the soldiers nor the influence of the prince could deliver the unfortunate cat-slayer from the wrath of the infuriated mob.

Mohammed had a superst.i.tion for cats, and was said to have been constantly attended by one. A cat hospital was founded at Damascus in respect to the prophet's predilection, which Baumgarten, the German professor (1714 to 1762) found filled with feline inmates. Turkey maintained several public establishments of this kind.

Howell the Good, king of Wales, 10th century, legislated for the cat propagation, and it would seem that the race was limited, since a week old kitten sold for a penny,--a great deal of money in those days,--and fourpence for one old enough to catch a mouse. The following ludicrous penalty was attached to a cat-stealer:--

"If any person stole a cat that guarded the prince's granaries he was to forfeit a milch ewe, fleece, and lamb; or, in lieu of these, as much wheat as, when poured upon the cat, suspended by the tail, her head touching the floor, would form a heap high enough to bury her to the tail tip."

This would seem rather hard on poor p.u.s.s.y, even to threatening her suffocation.

Huc, in his "Chinese Empire," tells us that the Chinese peasantry are accustomed to tell the noon hour from the narrowing and dilation of the pupils of p.u.s.s.y's eyes; they are said to be drawn down to a hair's-breadth precisely at twelve o'clock. This horological utility, however, by no means gives her a fixed tenure in a Chinese home. There she enters into the category of edible animals, and, having served the purpose of a cat-clock, is seen hanging side by side with the carca.s.ses of dogs, rats, and mice in the shambles of every city and town of the celestial empire.

Descending to the middle ages, a mal-odor of magic taints the fair fame of our _proteges_, more especially attaching itself to black or brindled cats, which were commonly found to be the "familiars" of witches; or, rather, their "familiars" were supposed to take the form of these animals; and hence, in nearly all judicial records of these unhappy delusionists, demons in the shape of cats are sure to figure. The witches in "Macbeth"

(for what impression of the times he lived in has Shakspeare lost?) awaited the triple mewing of the brindled cat to begin their incantations; and more scientific pretenders to a knowledge of the occult arts are usually represented as attended in their laboratories by a feline companion.

Fragments of a superst.i.tious faith in the magical, or what was till comparatively recent times so nearly allied with it, the medicinal attributes of the animal, still surviving in certain rustic and remote districts of England, where the brains of a cat of the proper color (black, of course) are esteemed a cure for epilepsy; and where, within our memory, such a faith induced a wretched being, in the shape of woman, mad with despair and rage, to tear the living heart from one of these animals, that, by sticking it full of pins and roasting it, she might bring back the regard of a man, brutal and perfidious as herself. Such formulae are frequently to be met with in the works of ancient naturalists and physicians, and were, doubtlessly, handed down from generation to generation, and locally acted upon in desperate cases.

It is on evidence that more than one old woman has been condemned by our wise ancestors to pay the penalty of her presumed league with Satan in a fiery death, upon no better testimony than the fact that Harper, Rutterkin, or Robin had been seen entering her dwelling in the shape of a black cat. But if, in ancient times, old women, and young ones, too, have been brought to grief through the cats they fostered, certain it is that these creatures have suffered horrible reprisal at the hands of certain vagrants of the s.e.x in our own.

Our _Felis domestica_ has, for a long time, labored under the serious disadvantage of a traditional character. Buffon sums her up as a "faithless friend, brought in to oppose a still more insidious enemy;" and Goldsmith--who, it is well known, became a writer of natural history "upon compulsion," and had neither time nor opportunity for personal observation of the habits and instincts of the creatures he so charmingly describes--followed in the track of the great naturalist, and echoes this ungracious definition.

Boys have a natural contempt for cats, and picking them up by the tail, tossing them over the wall, or tying old tin pots to their caudal end, to see how fast they can run, are among their most trifling sports at the expense of Tom and Tabby. I have known a cruel boy to roll a cat in turpentine, and set fire to her. Few men have any feeling but repugnance towards the feline race. The exceptions are in the past.

Cardinal Wolsey's cat sat on the arm of his chair of state, or took up her position at the back of his throne when he held audiences; and the cat of the poet Petrarch, after death, occupied, embalmed, a niche in his studio; indeed, poets appear to be more susceptible of p.u.s.s.y's virtues and graces than other persons; and she has, on many occasions, been made the subject of their verse, the sentiment of which fully expresses a sense of the maligned animal's faithfulness and affection.

Ta.s.so, reduced to such a strait of poverty as to be obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist on through a week, turns for mute sympathy to his faithful cat, and disburdens his case in a charming sonnet, in which he entreats her to a.s.sist him through the night with the l.u.s.tre of her moon-like eyes, having no candles by which he could see to write his verses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPORT FOR THE BOYS BUT DEATH FOR THE CAT.]

An editor facetiously says, "We have here among us at this time an addition to the M. D.'s in the shape of two cat doctors, who have the terrible idea that they were put upon this earth for the sole object of doctoring cats, and now the mortality list shows, at the least calculation, that no less than eighteen cats and two kittens have travelled to that bourn from which no pa.s.sengers have ever yet returned, and all because they were the unlucky sons and daughters of ye night prowlers who had been sacrificed for the good of the future cat generation."

PRESENT ERRORS.

I think some reason for the present errors and superst.i.tions attached to cats, may be attributed to the _cat_-adioptric qualities of their eyes and fur. At night their eyes often s.h.i.+ne with phosphoric light, and rubbing their fur with the human hand causes it to emit electric sparks, particularly in very cold weather. They are supposed to partake of ghostly, or witch-like qualities, because they can see in the night time.

Fish scales, as well as the flesh of fish, contain a phosphoric principle--there is no witchery about such--which can be seen best through the dark. The fur of other animals besides the cat contain electric qualities. Humans possess it to a greater or lesser extent. The eye of the cat--as also the owl--is made, in the divine economy, expressly for night prowling. The back, or reflecting coat (retina), is white, or light, that it may reflect dark objects. In man, and most animals, it is dark. A light-complexioned person can (_caeteris paribus_) see better at night than one who is dark. In a strong light, it is reversed. So much for cat-optrics.

Our cat-alogue would be incomplete without this cat-agraph, and we should "cat-ch it," hereafter, from some cat-echist, if we here discontinued our cat-enary cat-egory, without some little cat-ch relative to the domestic and redeeming qualities of this unappreciated cat-tle (excuse the cat-achresis).

Webster says the cat is a deceitful animal. Webster don't know. She certainly has large cautiousness and secretiveness. Man, with the same secretiveness, with the same neglect and abuse that Tom receives, will become doubly deceitful. Treat him kindly and affectionately, and he will return it. Subject to everybody's kicks, cuffs, and suspicion, the cat necessarily becomes shy, ugly, and appears deceitful. So does a child. The cat is fond of sweet scents, and pries into drawers and cupboards, oftener to gratify her sense of smell than taste. Cats are very fond of music, and occasionally go upon the piano keys to make the strings vibrate. Depending upon their own exertions for a livelihood, they become thieves. They may, by kind instruction, soon be taught to know and keep their own places.

The healthy cat is neat and systematic. Children may be taught a useful lesson by noticing that the tabby washes her face and hands after meals, and never comes to her repast with them dirty.

Cats are sometimes good fish-catchers, as well as mousers and bird-catchers, often plunging into water to secure their favorite aliment.

Their love of praise is exhibited in their general tendency to bring in their prey, and place it at your feet for your approbation. Give them the notice due them, and they will redouble their efforts.

It is a vulgar error to suppose their was.h.i.+ng over the head is a sign of rain, or that you can tell the time of tide by their eye-pupils, or that they can go through a solid wall, have nine lives, or suck away a child's breath.

The cat, as a sanitary means, should be domesticated, especially with scrofulous children and females. Either by their absorbent or repelling powers they a.s.sist nature in eradicating that almost universal disease--scrofula.

Teach children that "G.o.d has created nothing in vain," and nothing which will harm them if rightly used.

Here we bid good by to Tom and Tabby.

_The Owl._--The superst.i.tion which has hung about this very harmless bird is liable to soon cease in the extermination of the creature itself.

"Was you born in the woods to be scared by an owl?" my grandmother once sarcastically inquired when I was frightened from the barn by an old owl inquiring,--

"Who--a'--yoo?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WHO--A'--YOO?"]