Whether these names are anywhere still remembered as a mystic incantation, or all the qualities which they imply still imputed to the Gelloudes, I cannot say. But a modern cure for such of the demon’s injuries as are not immediately fatal has been recorded from Amorgos. ‘If a child has been afflicted by it, the mother first sends for the priest to curse the demon, and scratches her child with her nails; if these plans do not succeed, she has to go down at sunset to the shore, and select forty round stones brought up by forty different waves; these she must take home and boil in vinegar, and when the cock crows the evil phantom will disappear and leave the child whole[476].’ STRIGES. The Striges, though often confused with Lamiae and with Gelloudes, are essentially different from them. The two classes with which I have dealt are demons; the Striges, in the modern acceptation of the term, are women who possess the power to transform themselves into birds of prey or other animals; and it is only the taste for blood, shared by them with those demons, which has created the confusion. The Striges moreover cannot, like the Lamiae or Gelloudes, be claimed either as an original product of the Greek imagination or as the exclusive property of Greek superstition at the present day. The Albanians have a word σ̈τρῑ́γ̇ε̱α, and the people of Corsica a term _strega_, both of which denote a witch of the same powers and propensities as are feared in Greece; and it is likely that all of them--Greeks, Albanians, Corsicans--have borrowed the conception from Italy. The ancient Greeks indeed had a word στρίγξ identical with the _strix_ of Latin, but the shrieking night-bird denoted by it was not, so far as I can discover, invested by Greek imagination with any terrors. In Italy on the contrary the Strix was widely feared as a bloodthirsty monster in bird-form. Pliny evidently supposed it to be some actual bird, though he doubted the fables concerning it. ‘The _strix_,’ he says, ‘certainly is mentioned in ancient curses; but what kind of bird it may be, is not I think agreed[477].’ Perhaps in those ‘ancient curses’ it was invoked to inflict such punishment upon enemies as it once meted out to Otos and Ephialtes for their attempt upon Diana’s chastity[478]. The notion however that Striges were not really birds but witches in bird-form early suggested itself and found an exponent in Ovid[479]. ‘Voracious birds,’ he says, ‘there are ... that fly forth by night and assail children who still need a nurse’s care, and seize them out of their cradles and do them mischief. With their beaks they are said to pick out the child’s milk-fed bowels, and their throat is full of the blood they drink. Striges they are called ... and whether they come into being as birds or are changed thereto by incantation, and the Marsian spell transforms old women into winged things,’--such are their ways.