Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/392

fasting saliva being esteemed most efficacious. This popular mode of alleviating the pain caused by the injection of the usually acid secretion of insects is no doubt often made use of as being the easiest or most convenient way to moisten and cool the smart, and if the wound be instantly sucked with the lips, very likely the poison may be in part withdrawn and relief thus obtained; but I am convinced, as the result of a good many inquiries among people of various occupations and nationalities, that there is a popular belief that human saliva is effective in palliating irritating bites or stings of insects. It would not, perhaps, be easy to prove, but I strongly suspect that there is some historical relationship between our common custom of moistening such stings with saliva and an ancient belief that human saliva had power to antidote many animal poisons, and by its mere contact to destroy serpents and various other dreaded and repulsive creatures. A few superstitions that I have found show that this old belief still survives. In a previous paper I mentioned the New England notion that if a snake should spit into a person's mouth it would surely kill the latter; and now from Maine comes the converse of that superstition, viz., that if a human being spit into a snake's mouth the reptile will quickly die. Quaint old Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, a book remarkable for the exposure of so many fallacies current in the age in which it was written, expresses a doubt, founded on experience, "as to whether the fasting spittle of man be poison unto Snakes and Vipers," thus showing that this was an old English belief. Pliny recommends fasting saliva as a preservative against the poison of serpents; and in another place he writes: "But the fact is that all men possess in their bodies a poison which acts upon serpents, and the human saliva, it is said, makes them take to flight as though they had been touched with boiling water. The same substance, it is said, destroys them the moment it enters their throat, and more particularly so if it should happen to be the saliva of a man who is fasting." Pliny cites Marcion of Smyrna as authority for the statement that the sea-scolopendra will burst asunder if spit upon, and that the same is true of frogs and "bramble-frogs." Human saliva is popularly believed by the Japanese of to-day to be a deadly poison to centipedes. W. G. Black says that Galen believed that a scorpion could be killed by a person's spitting. A gentleman whose childhood was spent near London, Canada, recalls a superstition of that neighborhood to the effect that if one should spit on a toad's back the creature would split open, precisely the same as the belief which Pliny quotes from Marcion, save that in the Canadian form of the fable the toad takes the place of the frog. In the same locality in Canada children held that if a toad should spit on a person warts would be the result, and this notion is