with bringing this herbe and putting it to them: but Aristotle, and Celsus from him, doe shew that the young ones of partridges, doves, swallowes, &c., will recover their sight (being hurt) of themselves in time, without anything applyed unto them, and therefore Celsus accounteth this saying but a fable.”
It is curious to observe how universally this plant appears to be associated with the swallow. Chelidonium majus is Calidonia maggiore of the Italians; Yerva de las gelondrinhas of the Spaniards; Chelidoine Felongue and Esclaire of the French; and Schwalbenkraut of the Germans; while we, in English, call it Celandine, Swallow’s-herb, and Swallow-wort.
Besides the Swallow-herb there is the Swallow-stone, to which wonderful properties have been likewise attributed in connection with diseases of the eye.
THE SWALLOW’S STONE.
Dr. Lebour, in a communication to The Zoologist, for 1866, says (p. 523):—“I met last summer, in Brittany, with a curious fact relating to the habits of the common house-swallow. In Brittany there exists a wide-spread belief among the peasantry that certain stones found in swallows’ nests are sovereign cures for certain diseases of the eye. I think the same notion holds in many other parts of France, and also in some of our English counties. These stones are held in high estimation, and the happy possessor usually lets them on hire at a sous or so a day. Now, I had the good fortune to see some of these ‘swallow-stones,’
and to examine them. I found them to be the hard polished calcareous opercula of some species of Turbo, and although their worn state precludes the idea of identifying the species, yet I am confident that they belong to no European Turbo. The largest I have seen was three-eighths of an inch long, and one-fourth of an inch broad; one side is flat, or nearly so, and the other is convex, more or less so in different specimens. Their peculiar shape enables one to push them under the eyelid across the eyeball, and thus they remove any eyelash or other foreign substance which may have got in one’s eye;[163] further than this, they have no curing power: the peasants, however, believe they are omnipotent. The presence of these opercula in swallows’ nests is very curious,[164] and leads one to suppose that they must have been brought there from some distant shore in the swallow’s stomach. If so, they must have inhabited the poor bird for a considerable time, and proved a great nuisance to it.”
The tradition on this subject, current amongst the peasants in Brittany, is no doubt of some antiquity,[165] since
the allusion which Longfellow has made to it in his poem of “Evangeline” would seem to confirm this impression, inasmuch as we may assume that the tradition found its way into Acadia through the French colonists who were the first to settle there.
Longfellow, in his “Evangeline,” says,—
“Oft in the barns they climbed to the populous nests in the rafters,