“He who trims his nails and buries the parings is a pious man; he who burns them is a righteous man; but he who throws them away is a wicked man, for mischance might follow should a female step over them.”—(Paul Isaac Hershon, “Talmudic Miscellany,” Boston, 1880, p. 49; footnote to above, “The orthodox Jews in Poland are to this day careful to bury away or burn their nail-parings.”)
On a fragment of a Chaldean tablet occurs this curious passage:—
“A son to his mother,
(if) he has said to her, Thou art not my mother
His hair and nails shall be cut off,
In the town he shall be banished from land and water.”
(“Chaldean Magic,” François Lenormant, London, 1873, p. 382.)
In the province of Moray, Scotland, “In hectic fevers and consumptive diseases they pare the nails of the fingers and toes of the patient, put these in a bag made of a rag from his clothes, ... then wave their hand with the rag thrice round his head, crying ‘Deas Soil,’ after which they bury the rag in some unknown place.” Pliny, in his Natural History, mentions it as practised by the magicians or Druids of his time.—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 286, art. “Physical Charms.”)
SUPERSTITIONS CONNECTED WITH THE HUMAN SALIVA.
The most recent work on this subject is the extended monograph of Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, now in press, and to the pages of which the author of this volume has contributed his own collection of data.