to its presiding genius. They sedulously get out of sight of the Loch before sunrise, else they consider that their labour will all have been in vain.[1]
Dr. Mitchell states, in the pamphlet already quoted, that in Lewis the diseases of cattle are attributed to the bite of serpents, and that the suffering animals are made to drink water into which charm-stones are put. He does not describe these stones, but says that he has presented two, recently in use, to the Museum of Antiquities; they have been more resorted to for the diseases of cattle than of men. “Burbeck’s Bone,” however—a tablet of ivory, long preserved in the family of Campbell of Burbeck—was esteemed a sovereign cure for lunacy; when borrowed, a deposit of 100l. was exacted, in order to secure its safe return.
Dr. Mitchell’s allusion to serpents is curious in connexion with the following anecdote, transmitted to me by the late Canon Humble: “An intelligent sensible labourer, a Scotchman, was attacked by an adder while employed in levelling some ground near Pitlochry, in the county of Perth. Severe pain came on, and a terrible swelling, which grew worse and worse, till a wise woman was summoned with her adder’s stone. On her rubbing the place with the stone, the swelling began to subside.” The sufferer himself related the story to Canon Humble, saying also that the stone was produced by a number of adders who are accustomed to meet together and manufacture this antidote to their own venom.
Here we come upon a belief which extends, in part at least, even to Syria. In Kelly’s Syria and the Holy Land, 1844, page 127, we read: “They have a sovereign remedy, which absorbs, as they assert, every particle of venom from the wound. This is a yellowish porous stone, of a sort rarely met with (the very words used by the Scottish labourer of his adder-stone). A fragment of such a stone always commands a high price, but, when the piece has acquired a certain reputation by the number of marvellous cures wrought with it, it becomes worth its weight in gold. Madame Catafugo, the wife of a wealthy merchant, is
- ↑ From Two Months in the Highlands, by C. R. Weld.
