Note 12 — V.—CHARMS, SPELLS, AMULETS AND DIVINATIONS.

Most people are acquainted with the cant expression about “taking a hair of the dog that bit you,” now-a-days applied by those, who have drank too much overnight, to the morning glass supposed to re-steady the shaken nerves, but originating in a superstition common to both Europe and China. The idea on which it is based is that of the sympathy which a part of the body has with the whole. Thus a dog’s virus being powerless on its own body, a person will by swallowing one of its hairs enjoy the immunity possessed by the animal it came from. In Devonshire we find the idea oddly reversed, as, when a child suffers from hooping cough, a hair from its head is put between slices of bread and butter and given to a dog, who thereupon, it is believed, gets the cough instead of the child.12 In the same country it is supposed that you can give a neighbour ague, by burying a dead man’s hair under his threshold.13 The fact of a dog’s hair possessing mystic powers, in Chinese Hakka14 belief, is illustrated by the following incident related to me by a distinguished sinologue in this Colony.