If we seek for the origin of this superstitious notion of transferring diseases to trees, we shall find a clue in the works of Prof. Mannhardt, who recounts the names of demons which in Germany are identified with nearly all the maladies of plants, and particularly with those of Wheat and vegetables.[14] The superstitious country people, struck with the affinity which exists between the vegetable world and the animal world, came, in course of time, to think that the same demon caused the disease of plants and that of man; and therefore they conceived that, in order to safeguard mankind, it was only necessary to confine the demon in the plant. Examples of this belief are still to be found in our own country, and similar superstitious observances are common on the Continent. The German peasant creeps through an Oak cleft to cure hernia and certain other disorders; and the Russian moujik splits an Ilex in order to perform a similar curative operation. De Gubernatis tells us that the Venetian peasant, when fever-stricken, repairs to a tree, binds up the trunk, and says to it thrice, without taking breath, “I place thee here, I leave thee here, and I shall now depart.” Thereupon the fever leaves the patient; but if the tree be a fruit tree, it will from that time cease to yield fruit. In the Netherlands, a countryman who is suffering from the ague will go early in the morning to an old Willow-tree, tie three knots in a branch, and say: “Good morning, old one! I give thee the cold; good morning, old one.” This done, he will turn round quickly, and run off as fast as he can, without looking behind him. [14] The names of certain of these demons will be found in the previous chapter. But to revert to the superstitious practices of English Witches, Wise Women, and midwives. One of their prescriptions for the ague was as follows:--A piece of the nail of each of the patient’s fingers and toes, and a bit of hair from the nape of the neck, being cut whilst the patient was asleep, the whole were wrapped up in paper, and the ague which they represented was put into a hole in an Aspen tree, and left there, when by degrees the ague would quit the patient’s body. A very old superstition existed that diseases could be got rid of by burying them: and, indeed, Ratherius relates that, so early as the tenth century, a case of epilepsy was cured by means of a buried Peach-blossom; it is not surprising, therefore, that English Witches should have professed themselves able to cure certain disorders in this fashion; and accordingly we find that diseases and the means of their cure were ordered by them to be buried in the earth and in ants’ nests.