growth, a property ascribed to the knot-grass, as in Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Coxcomb" (Act ii. sc. 2):--
"We want a boy extremely for this function, Kept under for a year
with milk and knot-grass."
The cat-mint, when chewed, created quarrelsomeness, a property said
by the Italians to belong to the rampion.
Occasionally much attention in folk-medicine has been paid to lucky
numbers; a remedy, in order to prove efficacious, having to be
performed in accordance with certain numerical rules. In Devonshire,
poultices must be made of seven different kinds of herbs, and a cure for
thrush is this:--"Three rushes are taken from any running stream, passed
separately through the mouth of the infant, and then thrown back into
the water. As the current bears them away, so, it is believed, will the
thrush leave the child."
Similarly, in Brandenburg, if a person is afflicted with dizziness, he is
recommended to run after sunset, naked, three times through a field of
flax; after doing so, the flax will at once "take the dizziness to itself." A
Sussex cure for ague is to eat sage leaves, fasting, nine mornings in
succession; while Flemish folk-lore enjoins any one who has the ague to
go early in the morning to an old willow, make three knots in one of its
branches, and say "Good morrow, old one; I give thee the cold; good
morrow, old one." A very common cure for warts is to tie as many knots
on a hair as there are warts, and to throw the hair away; while an Irish
charm is to give the patient nine leaves of dandelion, three leaves being
eaten on three successive mornings. Indeed, the efficacy of numbers is
not confined to any one locality; and Mr. Folkard [19] mentions an
instance in Cuba where, "thirteen cloves of garlic at the end of a cord,
worn round the neck for thirteen days, are considered a safeguard
against jaundice." It is necessary, however, that the wearer, in the middle
of the night of the thirteenth day, should proceed to the corner of two
streets, take off his garlic necklet, and, flinging it behind him, run home
without turning round to see what has become of it. Similarly, six knots
of elderwood are employed "in a Yorkshire incantation to ascertain if
beasts are dying from witchcraft." [20] In Thuringia, on the extraction of
a tooth, the person must eat three daisies to be henceforth free from
toothache. In Cornwall [21] bramble leaves are made use of in cases of
scalds and inflammatory diseases. Nine leaves are moistened with
spring-water, and "these are applied to the burned or diseased parts."
While this is being done, for every bramble leaf the following charm is
repeated three times:--
"There came three angels out of the east,
One brought fire and two brought frost;
Out fire and in frost,