“Lend me your tigno: I am in agony,” says the sufferer with the swollen face.
The other hastens to unstitch and to hand over the precious object:
“Don’t lose it, whatever you do,” she impresses on her friend. “It’s the only one I have; and this isn’t the right time of moon.”
Let us not laugh at this eccentric toothache-nostrum: many remedies that sprawl triumphantly over the back pages of the newspapers are no more effective. Besides, this rural simplicity is surpassed by some old books in which slumbers the [[169]]science of by-gone days. An English naturalist of the sixteenth century, Thomas Moffett, the physician,[3] tells us that, if a child lose his way in the country, he will ask the Mantis to put him on his road. The Mantis, adds the author, “will stretch out one of her feet and shew him the right way and seldome or never misse.” These charming things are told with adorable simplicity:
“Tam divina censetur bestiola, ut puero interroganti de via, extento digito rectam monstrat atque raro vel nunquam fallat.”
Where did the credulous scholar get this pretty story? Not in England, where the Mantis cannot live; not in Provence, where we find no trace of the boyish question. All said, I prefer the spiflicating virtues of the tigno to the old naturalist’s imaginings. [[170]]
[1] 1.56 in. × .78 in.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814), an American loyalist, created Count Rumford in Bavaria, where he became minister for war. He discovered the convertibility of mechanical energy into heat.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[3] Thomas Moffett, Moufet, or Muffet (1553–1604), author of a posthumous Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Teatrum, published in Latin in 1634 and in an English translation, by Edward Topsell, in 1658. Although giving credence to too many fabulous reports, Moffett was acknowledged the prince of entomologists prior to the advent of Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680).—Translator’s Note. [↑]