While wormwood hath seed, get a handfull or twaine,
To save against March, to make flea to refraine:
Where chamber is sweeped and wormwood is strown,
No flea for his life dare abide to be known.
The inhabitants of Dalecarlia place the skins of hares in their apartments, in which the Fleas willingly take refuge, so that they are easily destroyed by the immersion of the skin in scalding water.[1031]
Pamphilius among others gives the following remedies against Fleas: If a person, he says, sets a dish in the middle of the house, and draws a line around it with an iron sword (it will be better if the sword has done execution), and if he sprinkles the rest of the house, excepting the place circumscribed, with an irrigation of staphisagria, or of powdered leaves of the bay-tree, they having been boiled in brine or in sea-water, he will bring all the Fleas together into the dish. A jar also being set in the ground with its edge even with the pavement, and smeared with bulls’ fat, will attract all the Fleas, even those that are in the wardrobe. If you enter a place where there are Fleas, express the usual exclamation of distress, and they will not touch you. Make a small trench under a bed, and pour goats’ blood into it, and it will bring all the Fleas together, and it will allure those from your clothing. Fleas may be removed
also, concludes this writer, from the most villous and from the thickest pieces of tapestry, whither, they betake themselves when full, if goats’ blood is set in a vessel or in a cork.[1032]
Moufet says: “A Gloeworm, set in the middle of the house, drives away Fleas.”[1033]
On the subject of destroying Fleas, the following pleasant piece of satire, by Poor Humphrey, will be read with a smile: “A notable projector became notable by one project only, which was a certain specific for the killing of fleas, and it was in form of a powder, and sold in papers, with plain directions for use, as followeth: The flea was to be held conveniently between the thumb and finger of the left hand; and to the end of the trunk or proboscis, which protrudeth in the flea, somewhat as the elephant’s doth, a very small quantity of the powder was to be put from between the thumb and finger of the right hand. And the deviser undertook, if any flea to whom his powder was so administered should prove to have afterwards bitten a purchaser who used it, then that purchaser should have another paper of the said powder gratis. And it chanced that the first paper thereof was bought idly, as it were, by an old woman, and she, without meaning to injure the inventor, or his remedy, but, of her mere harmlessness, did innocently ask him, whether, when she had caught the flea, and after she had got it, as before described, if she should kill it with her nail it would not be as well. Whereupon the ingenious inventor was so astonished by the question, that, not knowing what to answer on the sudden occasion, he said with truth to this effect, that without doubt her way would do, too. And according to the belief of Poor Humphrey, there is not as yet any device more certain or better for destroying a flea, when thou hast captured him, than the ancient manner of the old woman’s, or instead thereof, the drowning of him in fair water, if thou hast it by thee at the time.”[1034]
The old English hunters report that foxes are full of Fleas, and they tell the following queer story how they get rid of them: “The fox,” say they, as recorded by Mouffet, “gathers