[36.2] Featherman, Oceano-Mel., 85.
[36.3] Ploss, i. Kind, 78, 79, citing Rochholz, Alemann. Kinderlied und Kinderspiel. See also Mannhardt, i. Baumcultus, 49, et seqq. A custom similar to the Piedmontese is practised by the Mohammedans of Malabar, who plant a number of seeds of the Brazil-wood (Cæsalpinia Sappan) at the birth of a daughter, whose dowry the trees become when grown to maturity. Yule, ii. Marco Polo, 315, note.
[37.1] De Gubernatis, i. Myth. Plantes, xxviii.
[37.2] Monseur, 37; ii. Bull. de F.L., 148.
[37.3] Norman G. Mitchell-Innes, in v. F.L. Journ., 223. Compare the related superstition mentioned ante, vol. i., p. 179. We perhaps find in Tirolese folklore a relic of the same superstition in the belief that children are fetched from a sacred tree. Zingerle, Sitten, 2, 100; Sagen, 110. I have already (ante, vol. i., p. 154, note) referred to the English saying that children come out of the parsley-bed, and (ibid., p. 151, note) to the fancy of mothers in the New Hebrides that a child is connected in origin with a cocoa-nut, bread-fruit, or some such object.
[37.4] Mrs. F. D. Bergen, in iv. Journ. Am. F.L., 152. Mrs. Bergen informs me she obtained this on “the eastern peninsula of Maryland, near Chestertown, opposite Baltimore.”
[38.1] Leland, Gip. Sorc., 53. Compare a German superstition, Grimm, Teut. Myth., 1818 (956).
[38.2] Gregor, 148.
[38.3] The shrubbery grew from a laurel wreath dropped, in a chicken’s beak, by an eagle into Livia’s bosom after her marriage. Suet., Galba, 1.
[38.4] Yule, i. Marco Polo, 394 (bk. ii., ch. 28).