POPULAR ERRORS REGARDING THE SHREW-MOUSE.
No popular error is more absolutely destitute of foundation than that regarding the shrew. This little quadruped, very common in meadows and pastures in all parts of Britain, and generally known as the shrew-mouse, is as harmless as any creature that lives. Its food consists of insects and their larvæ; and its teeth are very small, so that it is scarcely able to bite through the human skin. Yet according to a popular belief, very widely prevalent, its bite is most venomous, and in many districts in England the viper is less feared. Nor is it only its bite that is supposed to be deadly to man or beast. Contact with it in any way is accounted extremely dangerous; and cattle seized with any malady, especially if shewing any appearance of numbness in the legs, are apt to be reputed ‘shrew-struck.’ Horses in particular are accounted very liable to suffer from this cause. An infallible cure, however, was to be found in dragging the shrew-struck animal through a bramble rooted at both ends, or in the application of a twig of a shrew-ash. ‘A shrew-ash,’ says White, in his Natural History of Selborne, ‘is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pain which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected; for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that whenever it creeps over a beast, whether it be horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of its limbs. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever.’ This tree, whose every branch possessed such a potent charm, was an ash in the trunk of which an auger-hole had been bored, and a living shrew put into the hole, which was then closed with a wooden plug. The incantations used when this was done have now been forgotten; the shrew-ash has lost its old repute; but the belief in its virtues still lingers in some quarters, and the belief in the dangerous bite and maleficent touch of the shrew is strong among the country-people in many parts of England. How confidently this belief was entertained even by the best educated in former times appears from many allusions to it by old authors. It was received as an unquestionable fact of natural history. In Topsel’s History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, published in 1658, it is said of the shrew, that ‘it is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle and tame; but being touched, it biteth deep and poisoneth deadly; it beareth a cruel mind, desiring to hurt anything;’ with much more of the like nature, and much concerning medicinal virtues ascribed to this little animal. But the belief in the deadliness of the shrew’s bite has been transmitted from one generation to another from times far more remote than those of this credulous author. It prevailed among the ancient Romans, and their remedy for a shrew’s bite was to cut the body of the little creature asunder and place it on the injured part.