In China, everything connected with the tilling of the fields is still a religious rite. Probably no country in the world of equal advancement has adhered with more tenacity to old usages in all that pertains to the turning-up of the soil; there are ceremonies in which the Emperor himself must lead with a plough. How much all this may have to do with the utilization of a refuse which has been so generally regarded as possessed of “magical” or “medicinal” properties, is, in all likelihood, never to be ascertained; but attention should be attracted to the fact, in the same manner that it was found worth while to make an examination into the history of latrines. “Among ourselves, it is a Devonshire belief that you can give a neighbor ague by burying a dead man’s hair under his threshold.”—(“Folk-Medicine,” Black, p. 27.) “In Devonshire and in Scotland alike, when a child has whooping-cough, a hair is taken from its head, put between slices of bread and butter, and given to a dog, and if in eating it the dog cough, as naturally he will, the whooping-cough will be transferred to the animal, and the child will go free.” The same method of cure is practised in Ireland, but the animal selected is an ass.—(Idem, p. 35.) “Certain oak-trees at Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, were long famous for the cure of ague. The transference was simple, but painful. A lock of hair was pegged into an oak, and then, by a sudden wrench, transferred from the head of the patient to the tree.”—(Idem, p. 39.) Clippings of hair and rags are offered to holy wells in Ireland, Borneo, Malabar, etc., not merely as offerings to deities, but in order to effect a “transference” of diseases to the people who may take hold of them.—(Idem, pp. 39, 40; quoting from Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” vol. ii., and others.) “In New England, to cure a child of the rickets, a lock of its hair is buried at cross-roads, and if at full moon, so much the better.”—(Idem, p. 56.) It is believed in parts of England that the hairs from a donkey’s back, wrapped up in bread, and given to a sick child, will cure the whooping-cough; another remedy of the same kind is to take clippings from the child’s own head, mix them in butter, and give to a dog, which will take the disease from the child; still another was to mount the sufferer upon the back of an ass, and lead him nine times round an oak-tree.—(See Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 288, art. “Physical Charms.”) The Romans attached certain omens to the manner, time, and place of cutting the nails and hair.—(See Pliny, lib. xxviii. c. 5.) The ancients believed that “no person in a ship must pare his nails, or cut his hair except in a storm.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 239, art. “Omens Among Sailors,” quoting Petronius Arbiter.)