During the Middle Ages it was held that the head of a mad dog pounded up and drank in wine was a specific for jaundice. If, on the other hand, the head was burnt and the powdered ashes put to a cancer, it was held a sure remedy, and, naturally, on the homœopathic principle of like to like, these ashes, if given to a man who had been bitten by a rabid dog, “casteth out all the venom and the foulness, and healeth the maddening bites.” The liver of the dog was equally efficacious. A gipsy preventative of hydrophobia was to take some hairs from the dog that gave the bite, a very risky operation by the way, and fry them in oil, applying them with a little green rosemary to the wound. To eat churchyard grass[64] was esteemed also a good thing in the case of anyone bitten by a rabid dog. So lately as the year 1866 it came out at the inquest held on the body of a child that had died of hydrophobia, that one of the relatives fished up out of the river the dead body of the dog that had done the mischief, in order that its liver might be cooked and eaten by the child. In spite of this the patient died. It was held that if a cat were in a cart, a state of things that need rarely happen one would imagine, the horses would soon tire if the wind blew from Pussy to them, and that in like manner the steed would soon flag that was ridden by a man who had any cat’s fur in his dress, and that anyone swallowing the hair of a cat would be subject to fainting fits. On the other hand, it was believed that nothing was better as a cure for whitlow than to put the ailing finger for a quarter of an hour each day into the ear of a cat. Anything that touches a cat’s ear is received with such marked disfavour that we imagine this remedy is simply unworkable, as the cat would never be a consenting party. Three drops of blood from a cat’s tail were held to be a cure for epilepsy, while a sovereign remedy for those who would preserve their sight was to burn the head of a black cat to ashes, and then blow a little of the dust three times a day into the eyes. This, we imagine, should rather be classed amongst the methods of injuring the sight. To cure a stye our forefathers had great faith in rubbing it with hairs from a cat’s tail,[65] two essential points being that the cat should be a black one, and that the operation should take place on the first night of the new moon; but to cure warts the hairs must be taken from the tail of a tortoiseshell cat, and even then the remedy is only efficacious during the month of May. Another strange belief was that a cat having three colours in its fur was a great protection against fire. It is an old idea that the brains of cats are of destructive malignity, and that anyone desiring to quietly get rid of an enemy has only to invite him to a repast in which some of the delicacies have an imperceptible fragment of this poison added.