removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other animal or object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the stomach may be cured by transmitting the ailment from the patient's body into a puppy or duck, which will probably die of it;[1] it is considered baneful to a Hindu woman to be a man's third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;[2] after the birth of a Chinese baby, its father's trousers are hung in the room wrong side up, that all evil influences may enter into them instead of into the child.[3] Modern folklore still cherishes such ideas. The ethnographer may still study in the 'white witchcraft' of European peasants the arts of curing a man's fever or headache by transferring it to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout or warts by giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree, with suitable charms, 'Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de Kolde,' 'Goden Abend, Herr Fleder, hier bring ick mien Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan,' 'Ash-tree, ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me,' and so forth; or of nailing or plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or conveying it away by some of the patient's hair or nail-parings or some such thing, and so burying it. Looking at these proceedings from a moral point of view, the practice of transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a very pattern of wicked selfishness. In England, warts may be touched each with a pebble, and the pebbles in a bag left on the road to church, to give up their ailments to the unlucky finder; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may be left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by; I am told on medical authority that the bunches of flowers which children offer to travellers in Southern Europe are sometimes intended for the ungracious purpose of sending some disease away from their homes.[4] One case of this
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FETISHISM.
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