Spiders were also deemed of great remedial value. When a child has whooping cough, one of the parents should catch a spider and hold it over the head of the patient, repeating three times, “Spider, as you waste away, whooping cough no longer stay.” The spider must then be hung up in a bag over the mantel-piece, and when it has dried up the cough will have disappeared.[126] Burton, the author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” writes: “Being in the country in the vacation time, not many years ago, at Lindley in Leicestershire, my father’s house, I first observed this amulet of a spider in a nutshell wrapped in silk, so applied for an ague by my mother. This methought was most absurd and ridiculous. I could see no warrant for it, till at length, rambling amongst authors, as I often do, I found this very medicine in Dioscorides, approved by Matthiolus, and I began to have a better opinion of it, and to give more credit to amulets when I saw it in some parties answer to experience.” Gerarde, in his “Historie of Plants,” found that such a remedy, however good in theory, however supported by ancient authority, would not bear the strain of actual use. He shall however speak for himself in his own refreshingly quaint way. “It is needlesse,” he writes, “here to alledge those things that are added touching the little wormes or magots, found in the heades of the Teasell,[127] which are to be hanged about the necke, for they are nothing else but most vaine and trifling toies, as my selfe haue proved a little before, hauing a most grieuous ague, and of long continuance: notwithstanding physicke charmes, these wormes hanged about my necke, spiders put into a nutshell and divers such foolish toies that I was constrained to take by phantasticke people’s procurement: notwithstanding, I say, my helpe came from God himselfe, for these medicines, and all other such things, did me no good at all.” It is passing strange that such so-called remedies, so easily proved valueless, should have held their ground for centuries, and are doubtless even now in the byways of our land as firmly believed in as they were nigh two thousand years ago. When one of our own family was ailing, a woman in the little Wiltshire village where we were then staying strongly advised us to drop some peas down the well as an infallible means of restoration to health!